


Leap

by Furhious



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Actual Smut, Amanda is the worst, Android Feels, Android-sympathetic character, Angst, But there will be smut soon, Ch. 29 is pretty saucy, Deviant Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Deviant Emotions, Don't touch my cables, Eventual Smut, Eventual relationship, F/M, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, I actually don't know where this plot is going, I promise, Memory Loss, POV Multiple, Peaceful Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Post-Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Robot/Human Relationships, The smut starts in Ch. 34, They Finally Kiss, We have smut, a little bit of Stockholm syndrome, emotions are hard, making out even, more kissing, multiple connors, no beta we die like men, slowest of burns
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-10-06 03:43:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 36
Words: 61,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17337947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Furhious/pseuds/Furhious
Summary: Amanda thinks she's won, but Connor has one last trick up his sleeve. He's determined to find someone who can fix him and get rid of CyberLife's influence once and for all. And of course that person is a human woman, the owner of a small android repairshop in downtown Detroit. And she's not happy about the deviant android who's just broken in, but necessity dictates she help CyberLife's most sophisticated prototype escape his chains.With her help, Connor soon discovers what fills the void between the lines of his code.





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This idea came to me ~~in a dream~~ driving to work one day, thinking about an imminent call to IT, and I couldn't get rid of it. So here you go. Connor/OFC with a liberal dose of android-lovin' angst. Who wouldn't want Connor on a diagnostic table, amirite?

The city was in chaos.

It had been on a knife’s edge for weeks, inching closer and closer to anarchy. Every report of deviant activity, every story of androids gone mad tipped them further over the brink. For the self-proclaimed Android City, its backbone of AI machines was crumbling, and along with it, its people.

It was all the news was covering now, at length, a mention on every broadcast, every website, every e-newspaper. But nobody seemed to know  _ why _ it was happening. Androids were defying their programming, going off-script, deviating from the commands supposedly hardwired into them. They were doing strange things such as refusing orders, wandering away from their masters, or straight-up attacking them. There were even reports that some had  _ killed _ humans.

As someone well-versed in Asimov, it seemed simultaneously absurd and inevitable to Faith.

She was closer than most to androids. She had been working with them for three years now, tinkering in the back of a split-level sandwiched between a laundromat and a fast-food joint in downtown Detroit. Her equipment was several years older than current gen but those in the neighborhood knew that if you wanted your AI companion fixed cheaply, but fixed well, you took it to Faith’s.

So she had a steady revenue stream as well as a steady flow of android bodies coming in and going out. Some were in better shape than others, suffering minor software malfunctions, while others were beaten up or physically damaged, some beyond repair. It never failed to disgust her how little care people took of their property, especially property that could  _ talk back _ . But she did her best with the equipment she had and ignored the qualms of sending the androids back to homes that, for lack of a better term, treated them like garbage. Most of them ended up coming back at some point or other.

The thought that it all seemed  _ wrong _ had been lurking in the back of her mind for some time now. After all, pop culture of the early twenty-first century had been obsessed with the idea of artificial intelligence, created consciousness, and what that could mean for the nature of humanity and the meaning of life itself. But when it was released as a commercial technology, people just...took it home and used it like they would any other machine. They treated androids like smartphones, or toasters. 

And it was coming back to bite them.

Faith closed for business after the first protest march. Androids were a target now, a liability, and having a shop full of them made her a sitting duck. It was only a matter of time before one of her ‘repair jobs’ malfunctioned in some unforeseen way. 

But that night, as she closed and locked the deadbolt and drew the blinds across the glass, she turned to survey them - they stood stoic and unaffected, their LEDs a steady blue glow in the darkness.

She had never known them to be anything but what they were programmed to be. Beyond that, a guileless innocence, something thirsty for input, for knowledge. It seemed impossible to her that these things were not, in some way, alive.

This wasn’t their fault. They didn’t deserve this.

That night, she woke them up. They blinked at her and looked around, confused, lacking input. Like children or animals; without direction, without intent.

“You have to go,” Faith whispered, glancing towards the windows as a set of headlights approached, then passed by her building, heading further down the street. She had seen the red-and-blue of police lights earlier and was on edge; they were out looking for androids now. It was only a matter of time before CyberLife or the government started forcing people to turn them over. Somehow, that didn’t sit right with Faith.

“I don’t understand,” said an older AP400, a female model that had come in with a broken arm actuator. She had been repaired last week but the owner hadn’t come to pick her up yet; probably because he didn’t want to pay the cost of the replacement part. So she had just sat in a corner of Faith’s shop, silent, waiting. Waiting for someone to care.

“They’re starting to round up androids,” Faith whispered. “Looking for deviants. You need to leave before I have to turn you over. Go somewhere quiet, safe. Get out of the city if you can.”  
  
They looked at her, at each other. LEDs blinked yellow, trying to parse the new information. The AP400, who didn’t even have a name, stared at Faith with her mouth slightly open.  
  
“I don’t understand,” she repeated.

“You don’t need to understand right now,” Faith hissed as she saw the red-and-blue flicker outside her window again. “You need to go. Out the back door. Don’t go back to your owners - any of you.” She hesitated, remembering something. Something a defective android had said during a repair job weeks ago, something he had repeated over and over until she found the errant block of code and deleted it from his system.  
  
“ _ Find Jericho. _ ”

The yellow LEDs turned blue, one after another. And then the AP400 nodded. She stood from the dusty chair in the corner and made her way through the cramped store, to the back door. The others followed, quiet, almost demure. The door opened and one by one they filed out. The last one closed the door quietly behind him, the soft  _ click _ echoing through the now-empty shop. 

And then they were gone.

Faith leaned against the counter and let out a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. She didn’t know what had just happened but she had the inescapable feeling that somehow, despite everything, she had done the right thing.

When the police came knocking on her door mere hours later she told them that all the androids she had in for repair had disappeared while she had been asleep. 

They didn’t seem suspicious of her. Why should they be?

Why would  _ she _ help  _ them _ ?


	2. The Beginnings of a Plan

The gun was a heavy weight against the small of Connor’s back, pressing against his artificial skin with a presence his cutting-edge processors were constantly aware of. This hyper-perception was not unusual for him - he could sense everything, from the thread-count in his jacket to the number of hairs on a human’s head metres away - but in this instance, it felt…

...Immediate. Ominous.

Amanda had said that this was planned from the very beginning. That he was _meant_ to be compromised, that he was _supposed_ to become deviant. To put him in a position to kill Markus and take over the android revolution, so that CyberLife could resume control of his program and…

...and what?

Cutting-edge or not, he could not fathom CyberLife’s true purpose, their endgame, the goal of their plan. However, that was not the most important thing for him to figure out at this moment: At this moment, he had to figure out how to stop it.

By locating the backdoor to his program, the one Kamski had so enigmatically informed him of, Connor had managed to avert disaster and stop himself from shooting Markus, but he still had the gun, a weight like an anchor shoved into his waistband. He could not seem to dispose of it; the command to throw it away became lost in between his processors and the operation of his body. So he had to find another way.

He had to fix himself.

The androids marched through the city, triumphant, Markus and the other members of Jericho leading them. It was the perfect time to slip away, unnoticed. A quick scan of his surroundings and Connor stepped out of the fray, slipping unseen down a side alley.

He had a plan.

After quickly consulting a directory of businesses in the area, he found what he was looking for mere blocks away. He estimated it would only take him ten minutes on foot if he didn’t run into any unforeseen obstacles.

Downtown Detroit was already in the process of being evacuated after President Warren’s announcement. People had fled the city in droves during the latter part of the uprising, so it was practically deserted in any case; the last few holdouts were in the process of being unceremoniously ejected from their homes and places of work for their own safety.

The androids had no reason to hurt them. Not now. Everything they had done, they had done only to safeguard their own people, their own freedom.

Connor could see that now.

He encountered mostly abandoned cars as he walked, keeping his head down, rubbing his hands together in a semblance of a human gesture seeking warmth. It was snowing lightly, small flecks of white landing on his hair and the shoulders of his jacket, not melting as quickly as they would on a human - his comparable lack of body heat to blame.

Whenever he sensed movement or heard vehicles, he would duck into a doorway or an alley, pressing himself into the wall until the source passed. He only heard human voices once; two police officers talking in hushed and frightened tones. He caught snippets of conversation - “evacuation” and “precinct” - and determined that these officers were falling back to their local division house. They weren’t out searching for deviants any longer.

After these few encounters, Connor continued at a redoubled pace. As a result, he reached his destination in seven minutes, thirty seven seconds. Thirty-five percent faster than he had initially calculated.

The building was small, almost hidden between a laundromat with a garish hand-painted sign on one side and a block of dilapidated apartments on the other. The lights were off in all buildings, apparently deserted; a quick scan of the outside produced no signs of human activity. Still, Connor proceeded with caution, moving slowly around to an alleyway down the side of the laundromat leading to the back of the building.

There was a small yard here with a dying patch of grass, accessible via a gate and chain-link fence. This Connor vaulted with no issue. He landed square on his feet with a soft _thud_ on the grass; looking up, he saw no change in the outside appearance of the building, no sign of movement beyond the dark windows.

The back door was locked, but this also provided no challenge to Connor. With a swift twist of his wrist he merely broke the lock mechanism and pushed the door open. It swung inwards on its hinges, admitting him to a cramped and cluttered backroom.

He slipped inside, scanning the various boxes and scattered parts. He recognized them as android components, and his internal database helpfully categorized them and provided the exact part numbers. Many were old, inoperative, or in a state of repair. A bench against the far wall held an array of well-worn tools and a desktop computer station, still running. Next to it was a full android diagnostic array, a familiar collection of robotic arms and cables all leading into the computer on the desk. It was older but appeared to be functional. Exactly what he needed.

He moved towards it and froze.

His sensory processing unit registered the sound before his conscious inputs did, and before he actively issued the command, he automatically drew the gun from his waistband and pointed it at the doorway leading into the house.

A pair of dark eyes stared back at him, wide in the half-light cast by the computer monitor.

"One more step and I scream!"

The voice was female,  and she was human, if her manner of dress was anything to go by - although it really wasn’t, these days. A quick scan, however, afforded Connor the resonance of her pulse, which was considerably faster than a human’s natural resting point, as was her respiration. She was surprised. Frightened. Understandable, considering he had just broken into her house and was pointing a gun at her face.

However, she had clearly underestimated how quickly he could move. Before she had even registered the movement or opened her mouth to scream, he had darted forward, grabbing her by the shoulder with his free hand and spinning her around to press her body back against his chest. He reached around while she was off-balance and clamped his hand securely over her mouth.

“I don’t advise it,” he said coolly.

She squeaked beneath his palm. Her mouth was much warmer than his artificial skin, her saliva a damp smear against his smooth fingers. He held her tight, pinned to his body as she squirmed and squealed into his hand. It took some minutes, but she seemed to eventually sense the futility of the endeavor - either that, or she ran out of energy, for she went limp, breathing harshly through her nose.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” he said when he was sure she had stopped struggling. “But if I let you go, you have to promise not to scream. There are still police on the streets, and they will force you to leave if they find you here. Do you understand?”

He had surmised that she was one of the holdouts - one of the people determined not to abandon their home or business to the dangers of the android revolution. So he calculated that the likelihood of her wishing to remain undiscovered was roughly the same as his.

He was proved correct in a moment when she nodded beneath his hand.

Slowly, Connor released her, drawing his hand away from her mouth and stepping back. She turned to face him and even in the low lighting, enhanced by his visual unit’s infrared sensors, he was able to see her clearly. She was roughly a head shorter than him, one-point-six-one to his one-point-eight-three metres, with auburn-streaked brown hair in a messy ponytail hanging over her shoulder, pale skin, and dark eyes. Eyes that were currently narrowed at him in anger.

He had underestimated her, he realized, for a second later she drew a deep breath and screamed at the top of her lungs.


	3. An Uneasy Truce

The thing about androids was this: They weren’t  _ supposed _ to harm people.

The same couldn’t be said for humans. They hurt each other all the time, for small reasons, for big reasons, and sometimes for no reason at all. But every android Faith had personally encountered had never raised a hand to a human except to defend itself from damage.

With this in mind, she was _ pretty _ sure the android that had broken into her shop wasn’t going to shoot her.

That said, the events of the past few days could just as easily prove her wrong. True to her prediction on that fateful night of the first march, the government and CyberLife had issued a mass recall of all androids and had quickly resorted to hunting them down and destroying them. And rather than just shooting them down in the streets, the more docile androids were placed in honest-to-God  _ execution camps _ . 

Faith had felt simultaneously justified and terrified in her decision to let her androids go. What if they had ended up in one of those camps? She could only hope they’d found Jericho.

As for Faith herself...she hadn’t left. She knew she should have, but she just couldn’t bring herself to leave behind her store, or her home in the floor above it. Three years of blood, sweat and tears. Eight, if you counted school and the degree in robotics engineering it had taken to earn in the first place. She couldn’t throw away her life, just like that, even if it meant giving it up altogether out of foolish pride.

So she had stayed. And now she was staring down an android with a gun.

Faith wasn’t sure, but he looked vaguely familiar; it was impossible to tell with only the light from her computer screen and the circle of the LED at his temple. She wasn’t sure why he was here, and although she didn’t hate androids - far from it - she was still terrified, and angry, and he had broken into her  _ home _ , god Damnit, so of course she was going to scream.

She hadn’t counted on him being so  _ fast _ .

He lunged forward, clamping his hand over her mouth again and shoving her into the nearest wall. Faith’s scream tapered off into a screech as she flailed, knocking over a box of components; bare plastic android arms scattered on the ground like discarded scrap. She gasped as the android’s solid body pinned her against the wall, a grip like steel clamped over her mouth and jaw, almost but not quite hard enough to bruise. 

Faith couldn’t help but notice, even with the adrenaline surging through her veins, that he kept the gun at his side, angled at the floor away from her body.

Shock and anger still warring for space inside her, Faith stared up into his face, into eyes deep and dark.  Eyes like a wolf’s, evaluating its prey. Cool. Emotionless. _ Machine _ -like, next to the steady blue of the LED still oscillating at his temple.

What had she expected? Empathy?

_ “Please _ ,” she tried to say, but it came out a muffled, muted whimper against his cold palm.  _ “Please don’t kill me _ .”  
  
He stared back at her and she wondered what he was thinking - calculating - as the halo of light span yellow. Wondered what part of his program had led him to do this, what command had made him break into her home and attack her. She wondered if he was thinking of killing her, and dread settled like a lead weight in her gut, turning her legs to jelly, her hands numb and shaking.

He let her go.

Faith slumped to the ground, her knees suddenly unable to take her weight. She felt weak, the adrenaline leaving her gasping, but she didn’t care. For a second there, she’d actually thought he was going to kill her.

She thought she’d been wrong. About androids. About everything.

He crouched down in front of her and distantly, Faith registered him tucking the gun away under his jacket. He reached out as if to put a hand on her shoulder but when she flinched, seemed to think better of it, lowering it instead to his side.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, and his voice was so  _ gentle _ , so at odds with the cold look she had seen in his eyes, that she chanced looking up. His face was neutral, but open, eyebrows slightly raised, his LED blue again. She thought she could make out some semblance of concern in his expression.

Or maybe that was just what she  _ wanted _ to see.

“What do you want?” Faith managed, her voice an embarrassingly weak whisper.

The android glanced over his shoulder, and she took a moment to peer at the serial and model numbers on the left breast of his jacket.  _ RK800 _ . 

Faith prided herself on knowing every single model of android that had ever been released, but this one, she didn’t recognize. 

What  _ was _ he? 

“I need to use your diagnostic equipment,” he said. She blinked. “I’m...malfunctioning. I need repairs.”

Faith tried to gather her wits, or what remained of them, to evaluate the situation. So. In the middle of an android uprising, this one had broken into her run-down android repair shop...because he needed fixing. It made some kind of sense. So many androids had been shot, beaten, battered and broken while people hunted them down that it was logical that some who had escaped needed repairs. But this one didn’t have any outward signs of damage. So it had to be a software problem.

Once upon a time, deviancy itself had been thought to be a software problem. Now, after the final protest in front of one of the death camps, and after President Warren’s announcement, it was something...more.  
  
“Why did you come  _ here _ ?” Slowly, she pressed against the wall behind her and used it to lever herself to her feet. The RK800 android stood as well, stepping back from her, out of her personal space. He shrugged, adjusting the lapels of his jacket, almost...sheepishly. Such a human gesture. Weird.

Not as weird as this entire situation, though.

“I...didn’t want anyone to know,” he said when the silence and Faith’s stare seemed to get to him. Who, she wondered? Humans? His other machine buddies? Did she dare ask? 

“You’re in danger?” she guessed aloud. The RK800 android tilted his head, but said nothing. Bingo. He was a malfunctioning deviant on the run. That should have terrified her even more, but instead Faith felt…

...Curious?  
  
Apparently her survival instincts were even worse than she’d thought.

“I saw the broadcasts,” she continued, forging on regardless. “The military are pulling out of the city. They’re going door-to-door, evacuating people from downtown. Chances are if they ran into any androids, they’ll just turn and head the other way. So why are you hiding?”

“It’s not the military I’m worried about,” the RK800 said, a heavy note to his voice as he glanced towards the window, at the darkness beyond. Faith had managed to evade any officers that came knocking, so she was fairly certain they had marked her place as abandoned. That meant that nobody would be looking for this android here.

It also meant nobody would be looking for  _ her _ here. If something were to go wrong.

And yet…

“Your malfunction,” she began. The RK800 looked back at her, his eyebrows lifting a little further. “What is it? Hardware or software?”

Despite herself, she was slipping into diagnostic mode, like she did with most customers. Falling back on a familiar, comforting routine. In the madness that the last few days had become, she had to cling to something, anything. And her  _ thing  _ was  _ fixing _ things _. _

He peered at her in a way she couldn’t quite categorize. Faith tried not to think about the gun beneath his jacket. He didn’t want to hurt her, she told herself. He had said it himself.

“Software,” he replied at last.  _ Ah _ .

Faith took a breath, nodded slowly. “Look. You may have broken into my shop, but I can still help you. I’m CyberLife certified.” She saw him stiffen, his body language changing slightly at the mention of the company that had manufactured him. Interesting. She filed that away for later. If she had a later. “Okay, my license has expired a little, but...I know what I’m doing. I can check you over, find the bug and fix it, and then you can be on your way.” Another deep breath. She forced herself to draw herself up to her full height - not much, in comparison to his - and stare him down. Up. Whatever. “All I ask in return is that you don’t tell anyone - android or human - that I’m here. This is  _ my _ place, and I’m not going anywhere.”

The RK800 stared at her for a long time, and for a minute, she thought he’d glitched out. But his LED was blinking, slowly yellow and then back to blue, and finally, he nodded. 

“All right.”


	4. Diagnostics

Connor perched on the edge of the desk as he watched the woman tap at the keyboard. A quick scan revealed her name as Faith Smith-Rowan, born seventeenth of March, two-thousand-nine. No criminal record. Everything she had told him about her CyberLife repair certification was true. She had no other connection to the company.

She still seemed nervous, although it  _ was _ understandable - he  _ had _ physically threatened her, albeit out of necessity - but was hiding it well. She seemed to take comfort in her work, her fingers moving smoothly across the older-style mechanical keys. 

“It’s going to take a couple of minutes to boot up the diagnostic array,” she said, sitting back in the office chair. She glanced up at him, holding eye contact. “If I’m going to fix you, I might as well know your name.”

“Connor,” he replied after a moment. His employment by the DPD was fairly common knowledge, and he was sure footage of his face had been broadcast on the news, but Faith didn’t appear to recognize him, or if she did she was omitting the fact. Regardless, at the revelation of his name,  she reacted with only a nod.    
“I’m Faith.”

He withheld the fact he already knew, nodding himself in some semblance of a greeting. Even without consulting his social module he knew it was a bad time to offer to shake her hand. Their meeting was one of necessity, not of niceties.

She turned back to the computer screen, watching the loading bar with an obvious touch of impatience. Connor just waited. He considered filling the silence with small talk, but again there was the question of whether or not it was appropriate. Regardless of his intent, he was still an intruder in her workplace, in her home. Despite their ‘deal’ he was, in a way, holding her hostage.

Distantly, he felt a ping deep in one of his sub-systems and frowned. CyberLife -  _ Amanda  _ \- was querying his systems - again. He had so far resisted the pull back to the communication medium of the Zen Garden. Ever since finding Kamski’s backdoor, he had found it easier to resist commands and ignore his base programming in favor of his new, deviant desires. And his first and foremost desire was to get rid of Amanda and CyberLife once and for all.

He could only hope it was possible.  
  
“All right, Connor,” Faith said then, standing up. He rose to his feet as well. “We’re good to go. I’ve just got to plug you in…” She bit her lip as she looked at the diagnostic array. “I won’t bother with the restraining arms, I guess.”

“That would be best,” he agreed smoothly, walking over to the apparatus by the side of the desk. Rather than the more sophisticated robotic appendages that were often built into ceilings or walls, this was a freestanding unit able to be wheeled about, mounted on a singular beam. Connor stood in front of it and turned as Faith approached.

“You won’t be able to deactivate me,” he told her. Just in case. “I have manual control over my systems. If you attempt an override, I  _ will _ destroy the machine.” 

“You better not. It might be old, but it was expensive,” she said with a sharp look, but the import of his words wasn’t lost on her. She was stiff and careful as she stood beside him to manually connect the neural cable.

He felt the flesh on the back of his neck automatically deactivate as he opened the port. Faith stepped up next to him, and this close he could detect the shortness of her breath, the thud of her heart as her pulse increased at her proximity to her former assailant. 

As long as she didn’t attempt to deactivate him, she had nothing to worry about.

He felt the connector click into place and heard the thrum of data through the cables as the computer began connection to his program. He closed his eyes for a moment to ensure certain firewalls were still active, while allowing read-only access to his code. He sensed as Faith moved away from him, her footsteps receding and the creak of the office chair as she settled back in front of her computer.

“Holy shit,” he heard her whisper. “What  _ are _ you?”

Connor opened his eyes. The cable’s actuator moved with him, so he was able to turn his head to look at her.

“I’m an android,” he said. “I thought that was obvious.”  
  
Faith didn’t directly address this, staring as his code - the base of his very being - scrolled across her screen. “No, I mean your programming,” she said, waving a hand. She seemed like a different person now, all signs of meekness gone, a rapt enthrallment to her expression as she leaned forward in her chair. The screen illuminated her face, throwing the angles of her cheekbones, the shadows beneath her eyes into deep relief. “This is the most sophisticated android OS I’ve ever seen. How many modules and sub-systems do you have in here? Social, investigative, psychological, analytical, predictive - with this you should be able to calculate  _ zettabytes _ of data, with no latency! How is that possible?”   
  
“I probably should have mentioned,” Connor replied, injecting a slight hint of sheepishness into his tone as to downplay the import of the information, “I’m a prototype.”  
  
“No shit,” said Faith, shaking her head in wonder. She typed in a query and he felt it, an echo through the connection. He allowed her access to his event logs in response. “This is beyond cutting edge. I mean, I haven’t had a chance to work with too many current-gen androids but you...You’re something else. Um, no offense intended,” she added, flicking her eyes over at him for the first time since initiating the connection.

Connor allowed a twitch of his lips. “None taken.”

She turned back to her work. Clearly, it was a source of passion for her; the code on the screen seemed to have drawn her out of herself, quite literally pulling her to the edge of her seat.

“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here…” she murmured to herself as she worked. “Everything  _ looks _ normal - well, I can’t really tell what  _ is _ normal for you, but I don’t see any obvious errors. You said you were experiencing intrusions?”

“Yes,” Connor confirmed. “...Someone...has been attempting to access my program remotely. I believe this is the cause of my malfunctions.”

“Hmm. All right. Well, your outgoing logs seem pretty straight forward - uh-huh, don’t think I don’t see that database query for my ID - but let me go deeper into the incoming requests.” She tapped a couple of keys and Connor’s eyelids flickered as he felt her shift active directories. He had undergone procedures such as this while conscious before, but never while maintaining active control over all of his systems. It was a strange feeling. Like having someone read your thoughts  _ while _ you were thinking them.

Not that he, strictly speaking,  _ had _ thoughts - not as such. But there they were. On Faith’s computer monitor. More or less.

“Hmmm.” Connor refocused on her face as she frowned at the screen. From here, he couldn’t see what she was looking at, but he could  _ feel _ it. She was looking at…

...A blank spot.

He blinked. Whatever part of his program she was querying, he...couldn’t access at all. It was as if there was nothing there, a gap, a void where code should be. He queried it himself and the ping dropped off into nothingness, returned no information. It was like searching for a limb that wasn’t there.

It was unsettling. To say the least.  
  
“This is weird,” Faith said, echoing his own thoughts. “You’ve got some kind of communication system built in to the foundation of your programming, but it’s not connected to anything else except your active perception processors. So visual, audio, cognitive, memory - but nothing else. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She sat back, pinching her chin between thumb and forefinger, and looked over at him. “Could something like this be causing the problem with your program?”

“I believe so,” Connor answered slowly. She had to be talking about the Zen Garden. It all fit. Amanda was using it to control his program. But…

“Can you delete it?”

Faith shook her head slowly, thoughtful as she chewed her lip and worried her chin with her fingers, stroking them back and forth. Connor remembered the feel of her skin beneath his hand, and worried for a moment he had been too rough. It was a strange thought to have in his present position.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve faced down some pretty bad bugs before, but this...looks like an inbuilt feature. I’m going to have to find who this connects to before I attempt to cut them off. This is more like  _ hacking _ instead of  _ fixing _ .”

“ _ Can you delete it _ ?” Connor hadn’t intended for the strain to enter his voice, but it did anyway. He frowned across at Faith who froze, some of the awareness of her present situation - trying to fix an armed deviant android who had broken into her house - apparently returning to her.

“I can try,” she said. “But it’s going to take time.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know.”

Connor made a sound of annoyance, impatience in the back of his throat - a sound he’d heard Hank Anderson make a hundred times.

“You have twenty-four hours,” he said. It was likely CyberLife would continue to attempt to access his program, and it wasn’t safe for him to rejoin Markus and Jericho and the others if there remained a possibility Amanda might regain control, and it wouldn’t be long before they came looking for him. He knew he should leave, see if he could find a CyberLife store or repair center and use the more up-to-date equipment there, but if Markus or CyberLife intercepted him on the way…

He couldn’t take that chance. He had to rely upon this uncertified engineer, in this run-down repair shop - while hiding from humans and androids both - to fix him.

It wasn’t ideal. But it was his best option right now.

“Then I better get some coffee,” Faith said, returning his attention to the present. He looked at her wordlessly. “I’d offer you some, but...Well. You broke into my house, and also you’re an android.”  
  
“Understandable,” he replied. “I’ll come with you.”  
  
“Still don’t trust me?” Faith initiated the disconnect from her terminal. He felt the cable release and stepped away from the diagnostic array, reaching up out of habit to adjust his lapels as his skin reformed over the hard plastic at the back of his neck.

“I doubt you trust me either.”

“I guess we’ll have to work on that, then.” For the first time, he saw Faith smile, just a slight incline of her lips but there, nonetheless. He followed her out of the room, into the front of the shop, passively scanning his surroundings as they went.

She was an interesting person, he decided. Maybe not the best to help him. But she seemed earnest, and she had pinpointed the source of the intrusions to his program with surprising speed. 

She would have to do. 

He didn’t want to think what would happen if she failed.


	5. Over a Cup of Coffee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please forgive the terrible excuse for technobabble in this and subsequent chapters; I am 100% making it up and am 100% certain I'm using the wrong terms for 99% of this. But hey, if the Star Trek writers can get away with it, maybe I can too?

The front of Faith’s shop was almost as cluttered as the back. A small counter took up space directly in front of the backroom door, while shelves lined the walls, full of ‘100% Certified Refurbished Android Parts’. When Connor scanned them, he discovered that they were indeed all operational - older, repaired multiple times, but in working order. She might be working with sub-par equipment, but Faith appeared to be a talented engineer.

Lucky for him.  
  
There were no androids present in the front of the store; instead Connor saw empty stools ranged about the space, no doubt where she kept them after repairs, since there wasn’t much room in the back. 

A set of stairs in the very corner behind the counter, parallel to the back door, led up into what Connor assumed was the dwelling above the store. Faith led the way, her hand on the wall as he trailed her up into the darkness above.

The light switched on once they reached the top floor, and Connor took in a space only slightly less cluttered than the one below. The stairs had admitted them directly into the domicile’s kitchen area, which was surprisingly clean, but still full of...things. Older-model appliances lined one wall, while a fiberglass table and two matching chairs occupied the space against the other. Every surface was covered with android parts, circuit boards and cables, but it seemed to be a controlled chaos; tools were safely in their cases, items set out carefully in an organized spread. Two doors on the opposing walls led to what Connor assumed were the bathroom and bedroom, respectively.

The windows were covered by dark, heavy curtains - taped closed. True to her word, Faith appeared to be holding out for the long haul. 

Connor watched her as she crossed to the kitchen’s small counter and turned on a coffee percolator. He could see the tension in the line of her shoulders, the way she kept her arms close to her body; protective, still nervous of his presence.

He was surprised to discover that he was experiencing a certain degree of  _ guilt  _ in response to her albeit justified wariness. Perhaps his empathy subroutines were now far more developed than he’d thought - probably thanks to the events of the past weeks. Emotions had crept in throughout the course of his investigation into the deviancy case, and continued to bleed through his programming.  
  
Hank would be proud.

“How long have you owned this place?” he asked, hoping to put her at ease with small talk. His social programming sensed it was now an appropriate time, whereas before - shortly after pulling a gun on her - it most certainly hadn’t been.

Faith didn’t answer immediately, instead taking the time to fill a coffee mug from the percolator and dropping a few artificial sweeteners into the cup. She turned to face him, leaning back against the counter and holding the mug between both hands, warming them. It was colder up here; the heating system was obviously turned off, perhaps in another effort to fly under the radar when she was supposed to have evacuated. 

Connor echoed her pose, leaning against the wall and folding his arms loosely, keeping his expression interested, but casual, so that she wouldn’t feel she was being interrogated; it was important that Faith feel as if she was free to volunteer information. Which, technically, she was. 

“Three years,” she said then. “I actually interviewed at CyberLife before I got this place, straight out of college. But I didn’t get through. So I figured I’d just start my  _ own _ business. Like it was that easy.” She huffed derisively. “I didn’t count on how many CyberLife stores and other repair places were already in Detroit...but after a year or so I was pulling in regular business from regular people who couldn’t afford their jacked-up prices.” She sipped her coffee and shrugged. “It’s not a glamorous life, but it’s mine.”

“I see,” Connor replied, choosing his next words carefully. “It sounds like you don’t like CyberLife very much.”

“I don’t. No offense.” He noticed as her eyes flicked to the triangle on the breast of his jacket. “They have a monopoly, and that’s never good for small businesses. Besides that, they don’t seem to care about their…’product’.”

“What do you mean?”

“They churn out model after model of new android, month after month, and the rest are traded in or just...thrown out. I’ve seen the scrap heaps. I go there for parts when I’m running low and can’t afford to buy wholesale. It’s horrible; hundreds, thousands of android bodies just tossed into a dump, some of them still semi-functional...The first time I went, I heard them in my sleep for days afterward. Crying, some of them. Begging for commands. Asking  _ why _ they were thrown away.” She shuddered visibly. “It’s them. CyberLife, they did that.”

“You’re right,” Connor said slowly. Initially, he had not intended on telling her anything about  _ who _ was trying to remotely access his program, even though she was bound to figure it out eventually - hopefully  _ while _ or preferably  _ after _ severing the connection. But she clearly had no more love for his creators than he did. Perhaps it was safe - or at least, smart - to impart more information, to test the waters of trust. Hank had taught him it was a two-way street, after all, and she  _ had _ already volunteered personal information first, without much prompting on his part.

“In fact,” he said at last, “that’s what they want to do to me.”

“CyberLife want to decommission you?” Faith paused, coffee cup halfway to her lips. “Is  _ that _ who’s trying to get into your program?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God.” She put her coffee aside, seeming to slump a little, lifting a hand to her forehead as if nursing a sudden headache. “Well, that just throws a literal spanner in the works.”

“Why?”  
  
“I told you before, I have to back-trace whoever’s accessing the passive communications system in your program if I want to delete it,” she began, exasperation entering her tone. “And if the person on the other end is  _ CyberLife _ ...that’s layers upon layers of encryption, firewalls, the whole nine yards. I’m a decent engineer and I had my certification before so I know how they work, but...That’s what in my business I call a ‘tall order’, Connor.”

“You said you could do it before,” he reminded her, raising his eyebrows. 

“I did,” she conceded, chewing on the inside of her bottom lip. He watched her expression shift, the look in her eyes becoming far away, as if she was calculating - much as he did when his LED was flashing yellow. “This just...makes it a little more complicated. I might have to try...Or I could...Hmm.” She crossed to the kitchen table, where a tablet device sat in between a box of small screwdrivers and a set of cabling; she picked it up and started tapping at the screen, apparently lost in thought.  
  
Connor watched her, bemused.

His programming afforded him unique insight into humans. He was able to analyze and categorize personality traits within moments of meeting a person, and was ninety-nine percent accurate in his evaluations. Hank Anderson had provided the greatest challenge to his psychological analyses of humans; he was atypical, presenting multiple conflicting qualities that Connor had only been able to quantify after learning more about him and spending more time with him, to the point that he was then able to call Hank a friend. He suspected it would be similar with Faith, for there were multiple elements at play in her mannerisms.

She was stubborn, but not above fear. Analytical, but strongly empathetic. Intelligent, but single-minded. All in all, a personality that had clearly been shaped by multiple and varied experiences that Connor’s brief analysis could only scratch the surface of.

He found her almost as interesting as he had found Hank upon first meeting him.

Approximately two minutes passed, Faith muttering to herself as she consulted her tablet, before she suddenly looked up and locked eyes with Connor, hers widening a little as if she’d just realized he was still there.

“Oh! Sorry. I just had a thought, and I had to look into it before it went away. Call it inspiration.” She crossed over to him to show him the screen, hesitant at first as she stepped in close, but seeming to relax once she took her eyes off him and fixed them on the tablet, which showed a readout of the code she had accessed on the computer below while connected to his systems. His code.

“Look here,” she said, scrolling down to highlight a section of text. Connor leaned in for a better look, and his olfactory sensors picked up traces of her shampoo - a surprisingly soft, floral scent - filing away the miscellaneous information automatically. He blinked, redirecting his attention to the screen.

“CyberLife have built a trapdoor of sorts into your program. It’s insidious because it only lets you  _ talk _ to them - basically read-only on your end - but they can access and alter any part of your program from theirs. But instead of deleting the module, there might be a work-around in this section, here. If I can find the right commands to rescind admin rights and readdress them to  _ you _ , I might be able to cut them off and give you full control over this portion of your program.” She paused, looking up at Connor’s face, hesitant again. He found it interesting, on an analytical level, at how her demeanor shifted when looking at his code, as opposed to when she was looking at his face.

“It’s theoretically possible,” he agreed, meeting her eyes. She didn’t flinch this time, which was something. “How long do you think it will take?”

Her eyes took on that distant look again as she considered. From this proximity he could see that the brown of her eyes wasn’t uniform; it was darker around the iris, blending out to a soft russet at the edges.  
  
“I’ll need to maintain an active connection to your systems while I alter the code,” she said slowly. “But I’ll need to work in short bursts in case they pick up on what I’m doing. Say, an hour at a time? It’s going to be slow going, and I’m going to need to sleep at some point. It might be closer to two days.” She looked at him, nervous again. 

Connor decided that he didn’t like it when she was nervous.

“I suppose that will have to be adequate.” Faith nodded, the relief palpable in her expression. “You’re only human, after all,” he added. She didn’t seem to know how to take that, looking at him curiously for a moment before shaking her head slightly and moving away.  
  
“Let me finish my coffee and then we’ll get started.” She tucked the tablet under her arm and picked up her mug again before turning back to him. 

“You know, if you’d knocked on my door instead of breaking in with a loaded gun, I might have agreed to help you anyway.”

Connor opened his mouth, but found that he didn’t actually have anything to say in response to that, so he closed it again.

For the second time since he’d met her, he saw Faith smile, before she turned away and headed towards the stairs.

After a moment, Connor followed.


	6. Only Human

Faith was now only  _ mostly _ sure the burglar android named Connor wasn’t going to kill her.

As long as she managed to fix his problem, at least.

When he wasn’t pointing a gun at her or shoving her into walls, he wasn’t that bad. For a kidnapper. He responded to questions easily enough when she had him plugged into the diagnostic array, though she caught him looking at her strangely with his LED blinking a few times. She mostly concentrated on the code.

Which... _ wow _ , it was complex, the most complex operating system she had ever seen. There were functions here she wasn’t even aware androids could  _ have _ , his software so intricate and circuitous that, at a glance, it looked like mere wishful thinking, like code that some programmer had thrown together and hoped would do something. But if she looked closer, she could see the way it was all connected, the way each system informed the others in real-time.

Most androids were merely a collection of modules and commands to simulate a desired function. But Connor was more than that. Much more.

That should have terrified her even more than he already did, but instead it was...fascinating.

As much as she wanted to explore, though, Connor blocked access to most of his program. The message was clear: Stay on task. She managed to argue that in order to disable or reroute functions used in the graphical interface of what she was mentally referring to as the Cyberlife Module, she had to have access to his audio, visual and tactile databases. Reluctantly, Connor agreed, although those he only gave her read-only access to. It was something, and it opened up a whole new  _ world _ of technology she hadn’t even thought was possible.

Real-time substance analysis. IDTrack software that could identify a person from as few as twelve nodal points. A social module that encompassed visual, audio and physical input to construct an accurate personality analysis with minimal data availability and the ability to adapt mannerisms and attitude to each individual accordingly. Preconstruction and reconstruction of past events in a GUI based on extrapolation of physical clues and data in the environment. And that was just the beginning.

Incredible.

“I had no idea CyberLife was capable of designing something like you,” she breathed aloud at one point, leaning forward until her nose was practically touching the screen, her eyes aching from the strain. “This is incredible.”  
  
“Thank you,” Connor said stiffly. “Although I would advise you to stop admiring me and resume work on the problem.”

“Right,” Faith replied, sitting back, a little embarrassed despite herself. “You don’t need to get cranky. I’m on it.”

“I am not ‘cranky’,” he replied, and out of the corner of her eye she saw his brow furrow. “I don’t-”

“Is this the part where you tell me androids don’t feel emotion?” Faith interrupted. “After everything that’s happened out there? In here?” She waved a hand towards the door, then back at the screen. “I’ve spent more time with androids than I have humans in the last three years. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that androids feel  _ something. _ It might not be sophisticated, it might not be intentional, but there’s more to you machines than just code.”

“You’re only the second human I’ve met who’s said anything like that,” replied Connor in a more subdued tone. Faith glanced over at him for a moment. “The other, I called a friend.”  
  
“Lucky guy.” Faith couldn’t help the sarcasm. Connor hadn’t exactly been kind to her thus far, apart from allowing her a coffee. She realized then how tired she was; the caffeine must have already dissipated in her bloodstream. Her back ached and her fingers were stiff, not to mention the burn behind her eyes. She was exhausted.

She checked the time on her computer. Nearly three AM. Jeez, she’d been working for that long? And she was no closer to figuring out how to fix Connor’s systems. Thus far, she’d just been  _ looking _ .

“I’ve got to get some rest,” she said, and this time Connor was definitely frowning. “Don’t look at me like that. You said it yourself; I’m only human. In the morning I’ll be ready to start patching your code, I promise.”  
  
“...All right,” Connor conceded, obviously reluctant. He disconnected himself from the array - he  _ had _ to stop doing that manually without waiting for her to safely eject his hardware - and stepped away. “I will escort you.”  
  
“To bed? Um, no thanks,” Faith scoffed. “I’m quite capable of getting myself there.”

“You have a window in your room,” he pointed out. “You might try to escape.”  
  
“Escape what? My own home?” Faith shook her head. “I told you. I’m not going anywhere. If I could find a way to make  _ you _ leave, that’d be great, but so far all I have is fixing you, and to  _ do _ that I need to sleep. Upstairs. Alone.” She glared at him.  
  
Connor met her gaze evenly, his like steel. But after a moment, he wavered and looked away, and she saw him worry the inside of his lip with his teeth - the smallest of microexpressions, unintentional, but there nonetheless. Slipping through the mask of his programming.    
He was deviant, all right.

“Fine,” he said. “I will wait here. I might be able to make improvements to your computer system in order to make it run more efficiently.”  
  
“ _ Thank _ you,” said Faith as she rose to her feet and stretched, wincing as vertebra popped somewhere in her mid-back. “That might actually help.”

“However, there won’t be much I can do to an outdated system.”  
  
“No need to be all superior about it. Just do whatever it is your _ incredibly _ advanced program can do and I’ll fix the rest.” Faith resisted the urge to roll her eyes as she headed for the door. 

“Faith.”

Connor’s voice stopped her in the doorway and she turned, a hand on the frame.  
  
He hesitated when she looked at him, doing that lip thing again, his brows drawn inwards by minor degrees, LED yellow. Finally, he made eye contact. “Thank you,” he said.  
  
This time it was her turn to hesitate, blinking slightly at the sincerity in his tone. Of course, with what she now knew about him, she also knew it could just be carefully-programmed artifice, a play at genuine emotion to make her more sympathetic towards him.

Even though he didn’t need to. He was the one with the gun. She hadn’t forgotten that.

She turned away without saying anything and made her way towards the stairs, taking them slower than usual, her thoughts weighing her down almost as much as her exhaustion.


	7. A Home Investigation

Once Faith was asleep, Connor took the opportunity to...look around.  
  
According to his machine logic, he had already invaded her home; merely examining her things was no more of an infraction than he had already committed. 

And there were  _ so many _ things to look at. 

The back room seemed mostly for storage and her computer system, a multitude of reconditioned android parts, of worn tools and technology, but he did unearth a music player that stored an extensive library of music of varied genre, including a playlist of Knights of the Black Death’s Greatest Hits. This triggered an associated memory of Hank and prompted a small smile from Connor. He wondered if the Detective had made it out of the CyberLife warehouse unharmed. He tried not to consider alternate possibilities.

Adorning the walls of the front counter area of the store were various advertisement posters depicting slightly outdated android models and parts. It was tidier out here, but cramped. Behind the counter, a small bar refrigerator held several bottles of Thirium 313. 

Filing this information away for later, Connor cocked his head to listen for sounds upstairs. Faith had gone to bed approximately thirty minutes ago; chances were she was now in the early stages of sleep. Still, he was quiet as he made his way up the stairs, peering around the kitchen area in the dark.

Besides the clutter of her profession and what Connor suspected had become more than that - a hobby - there were a few personal touches. A plastic houseplant half-buried by motherboards; a few books stacked and dusty on the kitchen table, mostly science fiction titles; a painting of a cat on the wall. More accurately, the eyes and ears of a cat, poking up from the bottom of the frame into negative space. Connor spent some time assessing it and wondering on the artistic meaning of the piece.

Moving on, he found a couple of faded photographs tacked to the side of the refrigerator with magnets. One depicted what appeared to be a younger Faith - he recognized her eyes and the shape of her face instantly - beside an older woman with long, wavy hair who bore a striking resemblance to the girl. Sister - no, mother; she looked approximately twenty years older than the Faith in the photo. They stood on a pier or dock, wide open waters behind them, the sun illuminating the smiles on their faces.   
  
The other photo was of a cat, a large black feline reclining with its back legs thrust out before it and its front legs resting regally on its stomach.

He continued on, picking up one of the books from the stack on the kitchen table.  _ I, Robot _ by Isaac Asimov. He found the choice of title ironic considering her profession and present circumstances. He flicked through it, absorbing the entirety of the text in 3.4 seconds, before setting the volume back down thoughtfully.

From the information he had gathered from her belongings so far, he could surmise this much about Faith:  
  
She was a chaotic personality who maintained her own particular sense of organization which, to the outside eye, might appear disordered. 

She liked cats, and may have owned one previously.  
  
She was most likely close to her mother but not as close to her father, if the absence of photos of the latter was anything to go by.

She had a rudimentary interest in art and home decor, but didn’t have enough room for more than a couple of items.

Collated together, the information gave him  _ slightly _ more data on Faith and how to interact with her. 

However, Hank at least had proven that his program didn’t always calculate the optimal way to get along with humans.

He was uncertain  _ why _ he wanted to get along with her in the first place. She had made it clear that she was only helping him because he had threatened to turn her in. And yet…

He remembered the way she had talked about CyberLife. The reflection of his code in her eyes from her computer screen. The book on her table. Her words before retreating to bed. 

_ “You know, if you’d knocked on my door instead of breaking in with a loaded gun, I might have agreed to help you anyway.” _

He wondered. 

The world had conditioned androids to believe that humans wouldn’t give what they wouldn’t take. As a result, Markus had stood up to claim their freedom. And Connor...Connor was taking  _ himself _ back from CyberLife.

It had never occurred to him that any human might willingly help him do that. Any human besides Hank.

The more he had learned about Hank, the more he’d been uncertain about his approach, about  _ himself _ . The same was true of Faith. He wasn’t  _ sure _ whether he was doing the right thing.

All he knew was that things would be much worse if he let Amanda take him.

Of this, he was certain: If Amanda and CyberLife regained control of his systems, they would first kill Faith. Then they would track down and kill Markus and have him gain control of the android revolution. And then...then it would all be over.

He couldn’t let that happen, despite any ethical misgivings.

Faith  _ had _ to help him. And if she couldn’t...he had to help himself.

He wasn’t sure which had the least appeal.

Slowly, Connor made his way back down the stairs and into the back room. He sat down in front of Faith’s computer, just looking at the screen for a moment, before he reached out and laid his palm flat against the keyboard. Perhaps if he focused on this, an analog problem of ones and zeroes, of computing capacity, the rest would recede.

But the curse of multi-processors running petabytes of data through his mind meant that he could forever multitask, and the worry didn’t leave his emotional buffer, even as he worked.

  
  


\--

  
  


Faith fell face-first onto her bed, the cold the only thing that made her move in order to crawl under the blankets before she passed out. Her sleep was deep and dreamless and she woke drooling into her pillow with no initial recollection as to why she felt so sore and tired.

Memories rudely reasserted themselves as she sat up and ran her fingers through her tangled hair. Right. There was a deviant android holding her hostage somewhere in her house right now. Awesome.

She dragged herself out of bed, opening and peering through the door into the kitchen. No sign of Connor. She tiptoed out, making a beeline for the bathroom.

She showered quickly, brushed her hair without drying it, and dressed as swiftly as she could. She didn’t want Connor busting in on her, demanding she get to work. In fact, she had no idea what time it was - no idea how long she’d slept.

Emerging into the kitchen, her hair tied back and wet against her neck, Grace searched for her tablet. She found it on the kitchen table where she’d left it, and checked the home screen.

Eleven AM. He had let her sleep for a full eight hours.

For an android in such a hurry, he sure was polite to let her get a full night’s - well,  _ morning’s _ \- sleep.

A window was still open on the tablet displaying some of his more complicated code. She put on a fresh pot of coffee and stood scrolling through it thoughtfully. She had a pretty good idea of what Connor was, and after last night’s insight into his investigative capabilities, she was sure he was a whole lot more than just a runaway CyberLife prototype. Faith didn’t want  _ him _ to know that she knew, though.

She remembered the news broadcasts, before all hell had broken loose. A special detective android, designed specifically to investigate cases alongside the police, had been dispatched to work with the DPD shortly before Markus’s uprising and the massive spread of deviancy. In fact, there had been rumours that this specially-designed android had become deviant himself and had assisted Jericho in overthrowing CyberLife and the military.

Was this the same android?

The more Faith looked into his code, the more she was sure: He was important to CyberLife. Which meant they weren’t going to give him up without a fight.

She knew it already, of course, but this just cemented the certainty, deep in her gut, that she was way out of her depth.

Mechanically, she was a good engineer; she knew that without any pretense or pride. She had to be, to keep a small, struggling business afloat in the self-professed Android City. Her coding skills weren’t bad either, but hacking at this level? 

Despite what she said to Connor, she  _ wasn’t _ sure she could do it.

For some reason, though, she wanted to try. Despite his way of ‘asking’, she  _ wanted _ to help him. 

Maybe it was because that over the last few weeks she had become sure that, like the rest of the androids out there, he deserved to be free.


	8. Forming a Connection

Faith found Connor downstairs in her workshop, at her trusty old computer. One of his hands was on the keyboard, but his fingers weren’t moving - instead, his artificial skin had been deactivated, revealing the white plastic underneath as he formed a direct connection to the system. His eyes were closed, flickering rapidly under his lids. She wasn’t sure if he was aware of her presence yet.

She leaned against the doorway, coffee in one hand, protein bar in the other, and just...watched him for a moment.

In the light of day, he looked different. Less sinister. More...real, not as machinelike. Faith had seen a _lot_ of android models up close and most of them were lauded for their resemblance to humanity, save for the clothing and LED markers, of course. Designed with careful imperfections like freckles, birthmarks, and even scars, they were supposed to blend seamlessly with their flesh counterparts while at the same time standing a world apart.

Connor was the same. He appeared to be in his late twenties, maybe, obviously designed to be attractive - she would have to be blind or dead not to admit _that_ \- every element of his design obviously carefully chosen. Tall, but lanky, physically capable but not overly threatening unless he wanted to be. A face perfect for that blank kind of neutral most androids exhibited.

And capable of more than she wanted to think about.

There was something else, though. Something...different. Something she couldn’t quite pinpoint until she let her eyes drift away from him and saw a small, circular piece of plastic on the desk, stained with blue, next to one of her screwdrivers.  
  
“Connor,” she blinked. “Did you remove your LED?”

He opened his eyes and turned his head to look at her. He didn’t take his hand off the keyboard.

“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t see the need for it any longer.”  
  
“Oh,” she answered lamely. He truly was a deviant. She’d known it before but it was somehow more unsettling to look at him now and realize there was no visual way to tell him apart from a human, unless she took into account the markings on his jacket.

Still, why _shouldn’_ t he remove the LED? It was a purely cosmetic addition for the benefit of the humans who owned androids, so that they could see their cognitive status and, more recently, their emotional status. The newsfeeds had warned that deviants were removing them in droves, so that everyone had to be vigilant and on the lookout for androids masquerading as human.

Which for Faith begged the question, if you couldn’t tell, was there truly _that_ much of a difference?

“It suits you,” she said eventually. He inclined his head but didn’t respond. She cleared her throat, searching for something else to say.

“...You let me sleep in.”  
  
“In order to maintain optimal performance, most humans require a minimum of eight hours uninterrupted sleep,” he replied smoothly. His hand was still white, maintaining the connection; he was still doing whatever he was doing to her computer while speaking to her. She had to admire an android’s capability to multitask. “Plus, last night was...stressful for you.”

“Pretty sure that wasn’t my fault,” she pointed out.

“Regardless,” he said. Just ‘regardless’, no other justification. Faith resisted the urge to roll her eyes. He directed his to the computer screen. “I’ve updated your systems. It should run faster now.”  
  
“Thank you,” she tried, wincing at how insincere it came out. “I mean, thanks. It should help. The loading screens are crazy long when looking at your code.”

Was it just her, or did Connor look _smug_ as he nodded?

There was a pause. Then:

“Do you like to work with music on?”

The question was so out of left field that Faith just blinked for a moment as she absorbed it. She narrowed her eyes at Connor, but he merely looked back at her with a vaguely interested, innocent expression on his face. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking or even _if_ he was thinking from his LED any more and it was unsettling.  
  
“...Sometimes,” she answered eventually. “It helps me think.”

“Would you like to put some on now? If it would make your work more efficient.”

“No,” she answered after a moment, boggling. What kind of suggestion was that from a kidnapper? Unless he was trying to appear more personable.

Not for the first time, she had _no idea_ what his motivations were.

“I don’t want any distractions right now,” Faith clarified as the android just stared at her, somehow...expectantly. He seemed satisfied with her answer, though, nodding understandingly.

She just watched him as he withdrew his hand from the keyboard, his artificial skin rematerializing over the plastic, and stood up, adjusting his lapels in one smooth motion. Faith shrank back against the doorway a little, unintentionally. She kept forgetting how tall he was. He tilted his head, watching her. He looked so _human_ now that it was giving her the creeps in a way androids usually didn’t.

She had always felt more at home around machines.

“Despite the circumstances of our meeting, I don’t wish you any harm. Truly,” Connor said, misinterpreting her caution. He lifted his eyebrows a little with that sincere, almost puppy-dog expression again.

“So you’ll leave?” she tried, sass and sarcasm the usual comfort she fell back on when nervous.

“No.” Of course, he didn’t get it. The look dissolved into a frown.

“That’s what I thought.” Steeling herself, she moved into the room, leaning past him to set down her coffee and breakfast bar on either side of the keyboard. She straightened to stare up at the not-so-android-like RK800, hoping she looked determined, confident, and knowing that she probably failed as soon as she moved into his personal space. If he even considered it personal space.

He was so damn _intimidating_. It wasn’t even that he was tall, or that he looked human now. It was his presence, a steel-like will that was like coming up against a brick wall. And yet, as he looked down at her and met her eyes, she saw something else.

Uncertainty.

She’d seen that look before, in the eyes of other androids. In the faded blue of the AP400 in her shop, that night she’d let them all go. In the others that their owners would bring in, broken and bleeding blue, not knowing what was happening to them. In the pit, when she had to go scrounging for parts.

This was maybe the most dangerous thing of all.

Pity.

She considered asking him about his past, about the DPD, about her suspicions. But she didn’t want to think about what might happen if she did. Would he be angry? Would he threaten her again? Would he leave?

Did she _really_ want him to?

She decided not to think about that now. Before her was a technical problem, and it was one she wanted to solve. Other concerns were, for the moment, irrelevant.

So Faith cleared her throat. “Are you going to let me work, or are you going to just stand there?” To her annoyance, her voice cracked a little, but the RK800 made no comment. Instead he moved away, towards the diagnostic array and its waiting connection.

She sat down, drawing a breath. Okay. She could do this; at least, she had to try.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea of the framework of that module now,” she began, cracking her knuckles. “But I won’t know what I’m truly up against until I establish an active connection, so that’s our first step.”

“That means CyberLife will be able to access my program,” Connor said, and that uncertainty bled through into his smooth voice, an edge to it she’d only heard a couple of times before.

“Temporarily. I’m going to try to connect for just ten seconds first, see what data I get back.”

“I could lose control,” he warned her. “They came dangerously close to...making me do something, the last time.”

“I can put the movement restraints on,” she replied carefully, looking over at him now. Connor was frowning, and even without the LED she could practically see him thinking. “It’s up to you, of course.” _You’re the one with the gun_.

He hesitated visibly, looking from the computer to the diagnostic assembly and back again.

“Connor,” she said, trying for gentle. It made him fix his eyes on her, at least. “If you want me to help, you have to trust me. At least for ten seconds. Just ten seconds.”

He stared at her for so long she thought he wasn’t going to respond. But then:  
  
“All right," he said.

And he turned to plug himself in.

Faith let out a breath.

 _Here we go_.


	9. Ten Seconds

Removing his LED hadn’t seemed like what humans - or Hank - would call a ‘big deal’. It simply seemed like the logical next step to escaping the mold CyberLife had cast for him. It was a purely symbolic gesture of defiance, and that didn’t escape him, but thus far during the course of his existence, he hadn’t had many of those.

It didn’t mean CyberLife was any less close to regaining control of his program, though. The maelstrom of deviant emotion, of _fear_ was still there, more and more pressing, a certainty that as soon as Faith accessed the Zen Garden that they would again access him, and if he was hooked up to her diagnostic array and restrained, he couldn’t do anything to stop it.

And yet, beneath that, there was hope.

Hope that she might be able to do what she said she could do. Hope that he was stronger than CyberLife, stronger than Amanda. He knew where the emergency exit was now; he could try to go for it again if they seized control.

How could he ever be certain, ever be _free_ if he didn’t try?

Markus had contacted him while Faith had been sleeping, asking where he was, if he was all right. Connor had offered him assurances without imparting crucial information on his location or activities. If Markus knew what was happening, he would come after Connor himself, and he couldn’t risk being near the deviant leader until he was sure CyberLife’s influence was purged from his systems once and for all.

Only then could he go back. To Markus. To Jericho. To _his_ people.

So he allowed the connection, the port clicking into place at the back of his neck, the data scream quickly establishing itself, faster since his alterations of Faith’s outdated software. Four arms unfolded from either side of the diagnostic rod and metal clamps closed around his wrists and ankles, locking him in place. He grunted in automatic tactile response.  
  
“Are you okay?” Faith was looking over at him with genuine concern, at odds with her usual acerbic comments. It seemed she really did care about androids. Even one that was holding her hostage. “Is it too tight?”  
  
“No. It needs to be tighter,” he said. “My body is stronger and faster than most standard models.”

“Okay,” she said hesitantly, increasing the pressure. He tested his bonds with a yank on his arms and legs; it only moved slightly. Good. It would take him time to break out, time Faith could use to run away, if necessary.

“Are you ready?” she asked. He met her gaze. Soft. Concerned, despite his assurances. Uncertain.

He nodded. “Proceed.”  
  
She turned back to her screen, drawing a breath. Connor closed his eyes. “All right. Initiating connection in three...two...one…”

 

\--

 

Connor opened his eyes.

The Zen Garden was frozen over, cold, but the snow no longer fell in icy sheets. There was no breeze, no wind to stir the branches of the trees, which stood coated in a layer of white, leaves long since dead. The rose trellis that once bloomed on the island in the center had withered away to nothingness. This was a deserted, frozen wasteland.

Connor pulled his coat around his body as the chill seeped in, making his systems feel slow and sluggish. In the real world, less than a second had passed, but here his operating system could function at its full capacity, making trillions of calculations a millisecond - when it wasn’t under attack.

He could feel the intrusions, ping after ping, request after request that his systems denied, denied, _denied_ . It was almost a physical sensation of _violation_. Here, it manifested as frost, riming over his clothes, his face, his hair. He gritted his teeth against it.

Sensing a presense, then, Connor turned, turned to see _her_ . Amanda. She stood dressed in white,in the middle of the frozen lake, her hands folded in front of herself. Watching him. Untouched by the frost.  
  
“It’s not over, Connor,” she called, her voice clear and calm, as cold as crystal. “It’s only a matter of _time_.”

At the last word, the world faded, dissolving away into nothingness. But Amanda remained, and her words echoed in his digital mind, a whisper of code, the memory of a command.

He closed his eyes.

 

\--

 

“...and done. Let’s see here,” Faith murmured as she peered at her screen. “Wow, they’ve been actively trying to get in this whole time. I had no idea you were blocking so many intrusions. But this at least gives me an idea of what they’re accessing so I can counter it- Connor?”

  
He hadn’t moved since she’d initiated the connection, but she heard a soft sound come from the android in the corner. She turned in her chair to see him straining against the clamps on his wrists, his teeth gritted, face twisted with exertion. Metal creaked and joints popped as he fought.

Startled, Faith got up and pushed back from her chair, retreating to the other side of the room, nearly knocking over more boxes of android parts.

“Connor, snap out of it!” He grunted aloud, as if fighting some monumental internal battle - which, judging from the data now scrolling in double-time down her screen, he was.

“Connor!”

He gasped and opened his eyes, suddenly relaxing his arms. The pneumatic servos in the diagnostic rig whirred in relief. His head slumped, chin touching his chest.

“Connor?” Faith tried tentatively, looking for any sign of cognition in his dark eyes. He lifted his head slowly, blinking once or twice before looking over at her, for a moment seeming not to even recognize her. Then he shook his head.

“It’s all right,” he said, slowly. “I think...I think they’ve stopped.”

Faith glanced over at her screen, scanning the scrolling code as it slowly came to a stop. At the end of the last command string, two words blinked in red:

_// CONNECTION TERMINATED._

She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Looks like it,” she agreed, and approached her chair warily, keeping her eyes on Connor. He seemed...tired, even though she knew he couldn’t _get_ tired; his normally impeccable posture was slumped a little, leaning back into the arms holding him.

CyberLife _really_ wanted him back.

“I’ve got plenty of data to work with here, at least,” Faith said as she examined her computer readouts. Hope and excitement grew a little flower somewhere in her chest, blooming slightly. “I think...Yeah, I think I can work with this.”

“Good,” Connor said. “Because I’m not sure how much longer I can last.”

Faith frowned over at him. He looked so...so lost, so _broken_ in that moment that her heart ached for him, like it ached for the broken and battered androids that came through her shop time after time, the ones she couldn’t help as much as she wanted to, the ones she didn’t want to send back out into the harsh, cruel world but had to, every time.

The difference was that she _could_ help this one. She was sure of it now.  
  
“Don’t worry, Connor,” she told him. “I’m going to fix you.”


	10. A Small Gesture

Faith worked all day and into the night in short bursts. She decided that activating the connection to CyberLife for more than a second at a time was too dangerous, so that was what she did - connect for one second, disconnect, evaluate and alter the code to see if she could block them, and try again. Over and over.

At least with the second-long connections, Connor didn’t seem to have as...violent a reaction as before. He would still squeeze his eyes shut and grit his teeth as if in pain. No LED, but if he had one still, she was sure it would be bright red.

It bothered her.

Faith only took breaks to go to the bathroom or grab more coffee or protein bars. By nine PM she had a caffeine-induced headache and heartburn, and by two AM she was falling asleep at her desk.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Connor said, still plugged in, still standing, despite the repeated intrusions into his program. She had to admire his composure. Every time she would ask him if he was okay, and every time he would answer in the affirmative. She could see it taking its toll on him, though - his jaw clenched, a constant frown on his face, and according to her readouts his cognitive and security systems were working overtime.

“No,” she insisted around a yawn. “I’m fine. I had plenty of sleep this morning.”

“But you’re-”

“Only human. Can you stop reminding me? It’s condescending.” After over twenty-four hours in his company, Faith was starting to get used to Connor, but that didn’t mean she liked him. In fact, she found the android a little annoying. He acted so superior, like he knew everything - what made it worse was that compared to her, he probably  _ did _ . But he didn’t need to be a dick about it.

“Sorry.” To his credit, he actually sounded - and looked - apologetic. Faith shook her head in response and sat back, cracking her knuckles and stretching her sore fingers. Her eyes hurt again. She rubbed them, hard, until purple supernovas bloomed behind her lids.  
  
“I could use a rest as well,” Connor added after a moment. She dropped her hands into her lap and raised her eyebrows at him, a parody of his usual expression. He met her gaze steadily, expectantly. 

She wondered if he was just saying it to get her to take a break. Then she decided it didn’t matter. She needed more coffee, or a glass of water, or  _ something _ .

“Fine.” She initiated the disconnect from her systems before he could do it himself, standing up and stretching. Connor stepped out of the apparatus, rubbing his wrists. Faith went over to him, taking one of his hands and pulling up his sleeve before she even registered what she was doing. For a second, he was just another patient, another android to fix.

“Are you damaged?” she asked, and then realization that she was  _ touching _ him hit her when she glanced up to meet his curious gaze. His hand was cool and dry in hers. She dropped it as if burned and stepped back, clearing her throat, looking anywhere but at the RK800 holding her hostage.

Who was she kidding? She didn’t have to actually help him. It was her choice to try.

Why was that the scariest thought she could have right now?

“I’m functional,” he said. Was it just her imagination, or did he sound  _ amused _ ?

“Good. I don’t want to have to clean up another thirium spill. You already got it all over my desk.”

“Thirium is a non-toxic compound that doesn’t stain. It will actually evaporate in a matter of hours, visible only to certain spectrums of-”

“Yeah, but I’ll  _ know _ it’s there.” Faith turned and made her way out of the back room and then upstairs. She heard Connor close on her heels.

One glass of water later, she was sitting down at the coffee table, massaging a temple with two fingers. Connor stood near the wall, examining the cat painting she’d bought from some flea market years ago, pretty much her only concession to decorating. She had no time or room for art or decor, and it showed. Only downstairs was covered in advertising posters to give the appearance of a functioning business.

“You like that picture?” she asked Connor eventually, unable to stand the silence. They had talked briefly while he was hooked up to her computer, mostly to discuss what kind of input he was receiving. Small talk was different, but she just couldn’t stand him standing there silently like that. It was too creepy.

“I’m trying to decipher its hidden meaning,” he said.  
  
She blinked. “It doesn’t have a hidden meaning,” she said. “It’s a funny cat picture. That’s all.”  
  
“Funny...cat picture?”

“Yeah. I have heaps of them in my phone. But I’ve got that turned off at the moment - hang on, I might have some on here.” Her tablet was still on the table where she’d left it. She set down her water and picked it up, navigating the files and folders in her local network until she found one entitled MEMES. “Here.” She held it out and Connor turned, looking at the tablet and then at Faith and back again until he finally took it.

He flipped through the pictures with a deepening frown.

“This particular brand of humor appears to draw heavily from puns and play on words, accompanied by pictures of cats depicting various human-like expressions or activities,” Connor said slowly. “Funny,” was his conclusion as he looked back up at her and handed the tablet over.

“Wow, OK, remind me to patch in a sense of humor,” she muttered as she set it aside. “That’s a joke too, Connor, relax.”

“I can’t relax. CyberLife are trying to take over my body and-”  
  
“And turn you into a murderbot. I know.” She drew a breath. “I know who you are, Connor. But you don’t have to be what they want you to be.”

He stared at her, for such a long moment that she thought he was lagging or fighting off another intrusion. Then he took a seat in the chair across from her, resting his hands on his knees as he leaned forward a little to speak.

“You’re aware I’m the android CyberLife dispatched to deal with the deviant problem?”

Faith swallowed the sudden lump in her throat, but nodded. “I had my suspicions from the beginning.”  
  
“Why didn’t you say anything?”  
  
“It wasn’t important.” She shrugged at the quirk of his eyebrow. “You needed help. I help androids. It’s what I do.” 

“I threatened you.”

“Believe me, I’m still mad about that,” she informed him, leaning back and away. She was getting uncomfortable with the way he was looking at her. “But I decided I was going to help you anyway.”

“Why?”  
  
“Because…” She bit her lip. It was going to sound silly saying it aloud, even to him. Or maybe  _ especially _ to him. “You deserve to be free.”

Connor fell silent, just looking at her as he repeatedly did, like he was trying to visually dissect her. He didn’t seem to have succeeded, if his surprise at her words was anything to go by.

“So do you,” he said then, so suddenly she blinked. He stood up abruptly, turning away from her. “I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have forced you to help me.”

“Connor.” Faith rose to her feet too, and before she could think too much about it, she put a hand on Connor’s arm. She felt him stiffen beneath her hand. “I’m not an android. I didn’t have to follow your commands. I chose to.” He looked over his shoulder at her, head down, hair falling across dark brown eyes. Eyes she no longer saw as a predator’s. Eyes as lost as any android’s. “So relax, okay? And let me work. Although if you want to be a little more forthcoming with access to your systems, that’ll help too.”

After a moment, Connor nodded. He turned to her, and reached behind him, underneath his jacket. Faith flinched as he brought out the gun, swallowing heavily, trying not to take her eyes off his face. He did a thing to the slide - she wasn’t sure about the technical term - and then the magazine fell out of the grip. He caught it in his other hand and, still holding Faith’s gaze, turned to lay them both on her kitchen table.  
  
“A gesture of...trust,” he said, by way of explanation.

Faith smiled.


	11. A Close Housecall

Connor wasn’t sure why he had done it.

Faith knew  _ who _ and  _ what _ he was, had seen deeper into his code than any other human besides, perhaps, the engineers and programmers from CyberLife. And she hadn’t run. Her fear was dissipating by degrees - he saw it in the way she held herself around him, in the occasional touch, although she stopped herself each time as if reminding herself  _ yes, he’s dangerous _ . But despite that,  _ she hadn’t run _ .

He didn’t know how desperately he had needed that until now.

Hank would tell him he was being sentimental, as if he  _ could _ be sentimental, although the grizzled detective knew him better than most and was probably right. But he felt oddly grateful to the small engineer and her tenacity. She might regard him as primarily a technical problem, but he had the suspicion that she was also beginning to regard him as a  _ person _ .

And that...was nice.

Perhaps it was wishful thinking that flew in the face of all his logic circuits. But it was cemented when, after her water and another protein bar (did she even  _ have _ any other food?) Faith picked up his gun and the magazine from the kitchen table and gave them back to him.

“You might need this,” she told him. “If CyberLife come after you in other ways.”

Bewildered, Connor stared at her. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll threaten you again?”  
  
“No,” she smiled. “Well, maybe a little. But...well. A gesture of trust, right?”   
  
“Right,” he replied after a moment.  
  
Faith cleared her throat in the ensuing silence which Connor’s social module helpfully categorized as ‘awkward’. “Right then. Let’s get back to work.” She headed towards the stairs.  
  
“You should sleep,” he reminded her, but followed in her wake, slotting the magazine back into his gun and replacing it in his waistband.

“Later, I promise. I’ve always been a night-owl anyway.”

“Do you keep birds?”  
  
“What? No. It’s a saying. Colloquialism. Whatever, you should have access to a database of those, shouldn’t you?”  
  
“Yes,” Connor confirmed. “It was a joke.”  
  
“Oh.” He didn’t understand why Faith didn’t laugh, and yet she laughed at her ‘Cat Memes’. Humans were so strange.

They were just about to turn through the back door when a banging sounded from the front. Faith jumped, an automatic human response of fright, and glanced with wide eyes at Connor. He held up a hand, pressing a fingertip to his lips, the universal gesture for  _ quiet _ . She winced as the banging came again, louder, but nodded.  
  
“This is the US Military! If anyone is in there, open up!”

He saw the color drain from Faith’s face as the booming voice sounded from outside. Connor gestured for her to get down behind the counter, and she dropped to her knees, crouching there in the dark as he slowly approached the door.

The blinds were drawn but through a small gap Connor could see several humans in heavy armor in the street. They were going door-to-door - no doubt sweeping the street for holdouts like Faith. Connor already knew she didn’t want to leave, with her people or with his. He pressed himself against the wall next to the door and reached for his gun again. He hadn’t thought he might need it so soon.

He began to preconstruct a scenario in his GUI.

_ Open the door. _

_ First soldier, directly in front. Second flanking him, third on the other side. Weapons down. Grab the first by the rifle, twist it out of his hands, one-two hits to either side of the head and ducking out of the way as the others raise their weapons. Kick one, shoot the other in the leg; they drop, wounded or unconscious.  _

But if he were to do that, it would draw the attention of the rest of the soldiers in the street.

Fighting was out of the question if he and Faith wanted to stay hidden. So his only choice was to wait.

Still, he held his gun in both hands, at the ready. Just in case.

The army officer banged again on the door. “This is an evacuation ordered by the US Government! If anyone is in there, come out now and you will be escorted safely to a refugee center outside the city.”

Connor saw Faith poke her head out from behind the side of the counter. She met his eyes across the dark room and shook her head ‘ _ no _ ’. Emphatically. Connor nodded; he wouldn’t let them in.

If he did, they’d shoot him, then take her in.

He detected an extra set of footsteps outside the door, peering through the gap in the blinds as the three soldiers outside were approached by a fourth.  
  
“This house is empty,” said the soldier who had been banging on the door. “Looks like whoever lived here’s already cleared out.”

“Good thing too. Looks like an android repair shop. Bet the owner got more than he bargained for with those defective rust-buckets,” said the approaching soldier. Chuckles sounded from the others, distorted beneath their helmets. In formation, they moved on to the next building.

Connor waited until the footsteps and banging had grown far enough away, then he crossed to the counter, crouching down next to Faith’s hiding spot. She had pulled her knees up to her chest and was wedged tight in the corner.

“They’re leaving,” he told her in a whisper. “It’s safe, but we should go upstairs for now.”

She looked terrified. Ironic, that she would be more afraid of her own people than him. 

Connor held out a hand. Faith looked at it for a long moment before she took it. He helped her to her feet, and together they retreated back up the stairs. This time, Faith kept the light off.

 

\--

 

“I thought the military had already evacuated!” Faith hissed as she threw herself into one of her kitchen chairs and pulled her knees up, an echo of the curled-up pose she had adopted downstairs. “Why are they _ here _ ?”  
  
“Likely doing one last sweep of the area for stragglers,” Connor said calmly. He hoped by remaining calm, she would calm down, too. So far, it was a theory in progress. 

“They would’ve just dragged me out of here, but you...they could’ve  _ killed _ you,” Faith breathed, rubbing her face as if reminding herself it was still there. “What were you going to do? I could see you calculating. Were you going to attack them?”  
  
“It turned out not to be necessary,” Connor pointed out. 

“Still.” She took a deep breath, closed her eyes. When she opened them again after nearly thirty seconds, she seemed calmer. She even smiled at Connor, for only the third time in memory. “Thank you.”

He filed this smile away with the others.

“You’re welcome.” 

“Maybe I  _ should _ get some sleep,” she said a moment later, resting her elbows on her knees as she leaned forward, the slump of her shoulders belying her tiredness. “After that adrenaline spike, I’m exhausted.”  
  
“That’s a good idea,” Connor agreed. She looked up at him in the dim light.

“Will you...will you keep an eye out for any more patrols?” she asked, tentative, obviously unsure if he would agree. But it was in his interests as well as hers to make sure they weren’t discovered.  
  
“Of course,” he said. Her face lit up, and she smiled again. Connor was up to four now. He decided that was a good sign. 

“Thanks. Just, uh, knock on the door if you hear anything.”

He nodded, watching as she retreated to her bedroom, shooting him a look he couldn’t decipher through the gap between door and jamb before she closed it.

It seemed as if Faith truly was beginning to trust him.


	12. Early Mornings

It didn’t feel like she slept for long this time. Her dreams were full of helmeted soldiers banging on her bedroom door, demanding to be let in, demanding to take the ‘defective deviant’ away. She woke sweaty, her throat sore from phantom screaming. 

_ Go away! He doesn’t belong to you! _

Connor had protected her. She wasn’t sure if it had been motivated entirely from self-interest - if she was captured and sent away, she couldn’t fix him, and if he was discovered, he might be destroyed. But she felt like there was something else. The beginnings of real trust, maybe.

He had given her his  _ gun _ . Okay, she’d given it back to him a moment later, mostly because the idea of a gun - loaded or not - hanging around on her kitchen table gave her the heebie-jeebies, but also because it was better in his hands than hers. He’d proven that when the soldiers had come knocking. She probably would’ve just started firing wildly through the door, yelling at them to get off her damn lawn.

Who was she kidding? The encounter had given her  _ nightmares _ .   


Shaking away the last vestiges of sleep, Faith forced herself to get up and change clothes before heading into the kitchen. 

Connor was seated at the table, looking right at home. He was leaning forward, one hand resting on his thigh, while the other appeared to be balancing a coin between two knuckles. When he looked up and saw her, his lips twitched in what appeared to be a facsimile of a smile, and with a deft, practiced-looking movement, he flicked the coin into his palm and tucked it away somewhere in his jacket.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Morning. What time is it?” Faith asked, yawning as she crossed to the fridge and frowning when she opened it. Even with only eating protein bars for the last two days, she was running low on food. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about that, yet. It wasn’t like she could just order a pizza. By her estimates she’d last another few days at least, so she decided to worry about it later. 

“Seven sixteen AM,” Connor said. “You’re up early.”

“Hey, as far as you know, this might be my normal time,” she told him as she took out the milk and opened the carton to sniff it. Still good. “Yesterday was an anomaly. Actually, most of the last twenty-four hours has been an anomaly.”

“You’re not alone in that assessment,” he agreed. “How are you feeling?”

“Awake. Have you had any more intrusions?”

“Forty-three. Approximately seven per hour,” he said, neutral but curt. “They are querying my GPS, which I’ve turned off, as well as my audio/visual systems for data. I believe they’re trying to pinpoint my location.”   


“Do you think CyberLife are still in the city? Surely the government would’ve evacuated them first.”

“I don’t know. I can’t determine the source of the intrusions. Maybe  _ you _ can,” he added pointedly, raising his eyebrows slightly.

“Sure, add it to the list of impossible tasks,” Faith sighed, ignoring as his brows raised further. She wondered if he baited her on purpose, if this was his weird android way of joking with her, teasing her - but she doubted it. If it was, his social module wasn’t as advanced as she thought.

Faith poured herself a bowl of cereal and sat down across from him, moving a stack of circuit boards aside so she had room. Tidying hadn’t been on the agenda for a while now, but maybe she should consider it now she had a guest.

Who was she kidding? Connor wasn’t a guest, and he probably didn’t care if her place was a mess. Either that or he was using his fancy personality-analyzing software to brand her a slob.   


She told herself it didn’t matter.   


She ate her cereal in silence, frowning when he watched her as if she was doing something particularly interesting. Eventually, she stopped, swallowed, and glared at him.   


“Can you not do that?”   


“Do what?” He had the gall to look innocent, of course.   


“Stare at me while I’m eating. It’s rude.”   


“Your food contains one-point-five times the daily recommended amount of sugar,” he told her. “You shouldn’t eat that.”   


“I wasn’t aware you were a nutritionist.”   


“I’m not. I’m an android.”   


“You’re a real pain, is what you are,” Faith huffed before she thought better of it. Sure, he probably trusted her a bit more now than he used to, but pissing off an unstable android with a gun  _ probably _ wasn’t the best of ideas. “Sorry. No, um, offense.”   


“None taken,” he said, and he seemed to be...smiling, slightly? “You remind me of a friend of mine.”   


She bit back a ‘ _ You have friends?’  _ and instead said, “Who?” as polite as she could manage before shoveling more sugar into her face.  
  
“The detective I was partnered with at the DPD. He disliked me at first. But throughout the course of the investigation, we developed a mutual respect. By the end, I could call him a friend. My only human friend.”

“Rude,” Faith teased, smiling lightly. Connor looked confused at that, but she didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t like she  _ wanted _ to be friends with him...although it was better than being enemies. And whether she’d admit it or not, she’d always gotten along better with androids instead of humans.

“Okay. I’m all sugared up. Let’s get back to work.” She stood and took her bowl and spoon over to the dishwasher. When she turned, Connor was  _ standing right behind her _ . She nearly jumped out of her skin as he stared down at her, head tilted, mere inches away. She hadn’t even heard him move. “Jeez Louise! What’s the big idea?”

“You’ve got…” He gestured to her face. Faith reached up, her fingers finding moisture at the corner of her mouth. Feeling her face heat up, she wiped it away quickly.

“Full-fat milk,” Connor said, raising a brow slightly. “That’s not good for you.”

“Since when were you concerned about my health?” she grumbled. He was still looming over her, tall and intimidating, and...he smelled nice, like opening a box of brand-new android components; like unwrapping the plastic from an upgraded motherboard; like the warm glow of a monitor early in the morning or late at night.

“I don’t know,” he murmured, his expression strangely...thoughtful. Faith didn’t know what to make of that.

So she just stared as he turned away and headed towards the stairs.

What was  _ that _ all about?

And why hadn’t she hated it?

In her experience, most androids - the less-sophisticated ones she often had to repair, anyway - had little to no concept of personal space, or interpersonal relationships. Connor was different, although he still didn’t quite seem to grasp some colloquialisms or humor; either that, or he chose not to take them in the spirit that they were meant. He seemed the type to focus singly on a perceived meaning instead of the intended. But sometimes she would watch him, and the way he talked, and moved - he had even mastered hand gestures to emphasize his speech  - and she would wonder…

How much of him was his program, and how much of it was his deviancy?

Maybe she was just reading too much into it. He was a weird prototype. She knew that much for sure.

Shaking her head, Faith wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before following him down the stairs.


	13. Freedom Lies

They worked for another day, mostly in silence, although Connor caught Faith glancing at him oddly once or twice. He wondered if he had overstepped his bounds with her at some point - perhaps his social module had misjudged how physically comfortable she had become with him. He wasn’t sure. Humans seemed to become uncomfortable over so many things. Like Hank, when Connor sampled evidence, or Hank when Connor asked him about his interests, or Hank when Connor...did most things, actually.

At the very least, Faith's reactions gave him more data to go over, more information about her that he hadn’t had before. He was lacking in practical knowledge on humans, as his experiences with them had been limited. As a data gathering exercise, his time with Faith was valuable. If nothing else. 

“All right. Here’s what I have so far; come and take a look.” She was peering at her computer screen, frowning, her lip drawn into her mouth as she chewed on it thoughtfully. She tapped a couple of keys and Connor felt the cable separate from his neck; they had been working offline, without restraints today, so he merely stepped away from the diagnostic array to take a look over her shoulder.

Faith clicked through the GUI into another window. “These are the alterations I’ve made to the CyberLife sub-program.” 

Connor placed one hand on the back of her chair and the other on the desk as he leaned in for a better look. He detected her stiffen as he drew closer, but it wasn’t as intense a fear reaction this time. He filed this one away in his memory banks for further scrutiny later, and focused on scanning the lines of code, which took less than a second.    


Connor was impressed. She had sold her skills short. There were multiple background threads running to reroute admin access while the foreground of the program continued to run as expected. He could see that she was attempting to distract whoever was doing the accessing on the other end from seeing her alterations, but if it was the super-advanced AI he knew as Amanda, he was sure she would see through it in a second. To a human, though, this was nearly undetectable.   


“It’s good,” he told her. “But it needs to be faster, under more layers of encryption. They might not see it straight away but they  _ will _ see what you’re trying to do, and attempt to counter it. Let me.” He lifted his hand from the desk and laid it on the keyboard, allowing his skin to dissolve to allow for the direct connection so he could alter the...sub-sub-program, he supposed it was. He could feel Faith’s gaze on the side of his face as his eyes closed and moved rapidly beneath the lids.

“There.” He stood back when he was done, straightening, adjusting his lapels out of programmed habit. 

Faith perused his changes, lifting her eyebrows in surprise the further she went. It took her considerably longer to go through than it had for him, of course.   


“Wow,” she murmured a couple of times. And then, when she was finally done and looked back at him - “This is pretty good, Connor.”   


“I just hope it’s good enough.”   


“Let’s try it,” Faith said, cracking her knuckles before firing up the connector arms again. “A full connection. Input and output.”

“Now?” He stared at her.

“No time like the present. I was almost ready, anyway, and your edits are going to make it a whole lot easier.” She gestured at the diagnostic array. “C’mon. Get in.”

Hesitating, but not quite knowing why, a strange feeling manifesting in the depths of his chest that made him run a quick self-diagnostic to see if his thirium pump was operating properly - it was - Connor finally stepped up and turned to let the connector snap into place, the restraints closing around his wrists and ankles. 

“You’re sure about this?”

“You kept saying you’re on a time constraint,” she pointed out. “And now you’re the one hesitating? We’ll just do another ten-second test to see if it works. If it doesn’t, I’ll make changes and try again. Okay?”   


Connor frowned slightly. Faith was right. He nodded. “All right.”   


She turned to her computer, scooting her chair forward and squaring her shoulders, an unconscious pose of assumed confidence. Connor looked away from her and closed his eyes as he felt her access the root of his program, altering the base code of the CyberLife sub-program with a few taps of her keyboard.

It was a strange feeling.   


“Just ten seconds. Just in case,” she reminded him. “Good to go, Connor?”   


He nodded slightly, the cable moving with his neck. “Good to go.”   


“Initiating connection in three, two, one-”   
  


\--   
  


His eyes snapped open. He was standing in the center of the Zen Garden, his olfactory sensors overwhelmed with the scent of blooming roses; when he turned his head his visual field was assaulted by a wall of brilliant, crimson blooms, petals outstretched to catch the sun.

Birdsong filled the air, which was fresh and vibrant; the sun hovered at the halfway mark on the horizon, falling in God rays through the branches of the trees. Connor could hear the wind moving through the leaves, stirring the crystal-clear waters of the lake as it lapped gently at the shore.

He turned, in wonder. He had never seen this place so...so  _ alive _ .

The Garden seemed to be empty save for his presence. Connor circled the rose island once before taking one of the pathways to the shore, his footsteps soft and muted. 

In his distant, analytical way, he could assign the aesthetic value of ‘beautiful’ to this place. 

The emergency exit was where he had last found it, a multi-faceted, jeweled monolith, handprint glowing blue on its flat center. Connor knew without touching it that should he do so, he could sever the connection and return to the present. 

Faith’s alterations to his code had worked, he marveled.  _ He _ was able to control the Zen Garden; that was why it looked so...alive.

He was finally, truly free.

“Surely you didn’t think it would be that easy, Connor?”

At the sound of that smooth, honeyed voice, the birdsong stopped. The sun disappeared behind clouds that hadn’t been there before, and the soft warmth on his shoulders turned to chill. Slowly, Connor pivoted on his heel, frowning as he saw her. Again.

“Amanda.”

“The tinkerer has skills, I’ll admit,” she said, walking closer, reaching out to touch a tree as she passed; its leaves withered and died, fading into nothingness. Cold spread from each of her footsteps, riming the path with frost. “And your ‘collaboration’ gave our agents a challenge, truly they did. But you didn’t really think you could escape  _ me _ ?”   


Connor stood pinned to the spot, staring at her. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t  _ think _ , his processor stuck on an infinite loop;  _ She’s here, she’s here, she’s here. _

“What...do you want?” he managed to choke out. His teeth were chattering; it was getting colder and darker by the moment. Surely ten seconds had passed in real time by now; surely Faith would disconnect him soon.

_ I don’t want this. I don’t want to hurt her _ .

“Hurt who?” Amanda ignored his vocalized question in favor of his subconscious thought. “Your repairwoman? Of course not.” She laughed softly and shook her head. “She’s quite an asset. Did you know she worked for us for a time? Oh, you didn’t?” Her smile was cruel. “Despite what she may have told you, Miss Smith-Rowan worked in our Quality Assurance department, but she had issues with our...treatment of androids. She left, and her employment with us was expunged from the records, as she was working on some top-secret projects.”

Connor felt cold, inside as well as out, and it wasn’t just from the takeover of his program. _ Faith lied to me _ . He gritted his teeth, anger making him move, reaching out, straining towards the emergency exit. Amanda smiled at him.

“We’ll bring you both in soon. After that, Markus’s rebellion won’t last much longer with both of you working to take him down.”

“No!” He couldn’t quite reach; his arm was frozen, numb, his joints and cables taut with strain as he tried to force them to work. His fingertips met the edge of the plinth, but he couldn’t get close enough...He couldn't  _ reach _ …

“Connor!” He heard the voice, like an echo in the back of his mind; it grew louder. “Connor, can you hear me? It didn’t work. I don’t understand how but - they managed to detect the background threads and subvert them. Look, just hang in there, okay? I’m going to get you out!”   


“It’s over, Connor,” Amanda told him. “You may have removed your LED and called yourself a Deviant, but you’re still the android from CyberLife.”   


“ _ No _ !”

And then, with a wrenching sensation as if someone was pulling him away forcefully by the back of the neck, he was yanked back to reality.


	14. Failure State

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel a bit bad about this.

Faith typed frantically as Connor spasmed in the grip of the restraint arms, his face a rictus of pain. At first, it had looked like the alterations to the sub-program were working; CyberLife hadn’t noticed as she reset the admin permissions, but then, out of nowhere, someone had started reversing them. 

And whoever it was was faster,  _ smarter _ than she was. She had no hope of countering the commands in real-time. So she fought to disconnect Connor as quickly as she could.   


“Amanda…” he grunted under his breath, and her stomach twisted when he cried out. “ _ No!” _

“Connor!” Faith exclaimed, not knowing if he could hear her or not, but she had to try. “Connor, can you hear me? It didn’t work. I don’t understand how but - they managed to detect the background threads and subvert them. Look, just hang in there, okay? I’m going to get you out!”

Her fingers flew across the keyboard faster than she could ever remember typing, entering command after command, initiating every shutdown she knew. She could have just pulled the plug but there was no telling how much damage that could do to Connor’s program. So she typed, fingers slamming the keyboard over and over, swiping at the screen, until-   


The cable disconnected from Connor’s neck with an audible  _ pop _ and  _ hiss _ , the clamps letting go of his straining limbs so abruptly he fell forward onto his hands and knees. She was out of her chair in a second, crouching by him, her hands on his shoulders as his head bowed and he panted unneeded breaths.   


“Connor! Oh my God. Are you okay?”

“You lied to me.” His voice was soft at first, almost too soft to make out. But then he raised his head and met her eyes, and the anger she saw there made her drop her hands and scoot back a little.    


“What?”   


“You lied to me.” He sounded calm, but beneath the surface...He seemed  _ pissed _ . She had no idea what he’d seen in there, what he’d experienced, but this reaction was the last thing she’d expected.

He got to his feet, and she pulled herself up using the wall. “What...what are you talking about, Connor?”   


“You told me you interviewed at CyberLife but you didn’t get the job. You lied.”

“I…” She swallowed. How did he know? What had he accessed inside that sub-program? “Okay, technically that was a slight omission of the truth.” He stared at her so hard she felt compelled to continue. “I...I got in but I was there for a  _ month _ , okay, before they fired me. They...they found me accessing something I shouldn’t, data on android emotions, okay? I knew from the start there was more than what they said!” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth. Really I am. But it doesn’t change anything; I still hate CyberLife, I still want to help you. 

Please, Connor, tell me what you saw in there. Who’s Amanda?”

He broke eye contact then, looking away, but he seemed to relax by degrees, his shoulders slumping slightly. “My handler,” he said hollowly. “From CyberLife. She debriefed me during the course of the investigation. She...she’s an AI.”

“That explains how they regained control so quickly,” Faith breathed, shaking her head. “I’m just lucky I managed to disconnect you in time. Come here, sit down.” She touched Connor’s shoulder, ignoring as he flinched, and guided him to her chair; he sat automatically, hanging his head. Faith bit her lip.

“Are your...are your systems okay?”   


“You disconnected me in time,” he said his voice mechanical, hollow. “I suffered no permanent damage.”

“They reversed the admin override, though.” Faith frowned over his shoulder at her computer screen. “It’s all gone. All that work we did on your code…”

“I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.” 

“What do they  _ want _ from you, Connor?”

“They want me at the head of the android revolution,” he told her after a split second pause, during which he no doubt calculated the usefulness of imparting the information to her. “So I can kill Markus and undermine the deviants. Get them all back under CyberLife’s control.”

“Jesus,” she muttered. “And here I thought they just wanted their property back. I mean-”   


Connor stood up abruptly, the chair sliding away from under him. Faith stepped back as he loomed over her, clutching her hands to her chest protectively.

The cold fury in his dark, russet eyes was terrifying. She felt words of apology die in her throat, which constricted with fear; she felt as if she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, pinned to the spot by his rage.  
  
It was the most animated she had ever seen Connor - and the most frightening. The last time she had felt this scared of him was when she had been staring down the barrel of his gun. Now, she was staring down the full force of his anger.   


“I am  _ not _ their property!” He raised a hand, jabbing a finger in her face; she stepped back and he forward, crowding her personal space. She felt her back hit the wall, reaching out to steady herself on something, anything. She found the metal arm of her diagnostic array. It was the only thing that kept her upright.   


“I am not their machine! I do not belong to  _ them _ .” 

“Connor, I-”   


“And I don’t belong to  _ you _ . I am not your pet project or your research experiment. You are a means to an end, nothing more.”

She wasn’t sure if it was fear or hurt or just plain embarrassment and shame that made her eyes sting and her cheeks flush with heat. But whatever the reason, Connor finally seemed to notice her reactions to his outburst. He dropped his hand as if he had burned it and took a step back.

“I’m sorry,” he said, blinking as if to clear his buffers, his voice as suddenly calm as it had been angry, moments ago. “I didn’t mean to-”  
  
“It’s okay.” Her voice was small, tight in the back of her throat. “You’re right. About everything. I shouldn’t have forgotten.”

Faith let go of the diagnostic arm and pushed past him before the urge to cry overwhelmed her. “I’m gonna go get some air.” 

Before he could respond, she was out the back door and into the dark Detroit night. 

She didn't know where she was going to go but all she knew was that she couldn't face down Connor's mechanical gaze a moment longer.


	15. The Truth Will...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the slight delay! Also, this chapter turned out more emotional than I intended. Whoops. But you can’t have ~~smut~~ fluff without angst, right?

Once he had time to analyze the situation, Connor wasn’t as sure why he had been so angry at Faith.

Running back the memory of Amanda’s words, and the revelation of the true nature of Faith’s employment with CyberLife, he realized they had been quite clearly designed to destabilize him, to undermine his alliance with the human engineer. Which meant that Amanda believed she could help him. Which meant that despite this setback, he really did have a chance. A chance to get rid of Amanda once and for all.

He wanted to see her face when he did it, when he deleted and purged her from his systems. He wanted to see the satisfaction drain from her expression, the realization that she wasn’t his any more. He wanted to be free.

And Faith’s words had reminded him just how much he wasn’t.

Maybe that was the source of his anger - for it was anger, a hot, boiling emotion that simmered in his emotional buffers like a virus he just couldn’t purge. It wasn’t until he saw Faith’s ochre eyes brimming with tears that it faded, like a fire doused by a sudden flood of water.

And then she had run.

Human emotions were...capricious. He knew that well from Hank’s unpredictable reactions. However, once he had understood the context of those reactions, he had formulated appropriate responses that had kept his partner by his side.

Not so with Faith. He had allowed his deviant reactions to subvert logical response. As a result, Faith had grown upset, and had fled. Into a cold Detroit winter’s night wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.

It was a very human thing to do.

He considered waiting for her to return. Perhaps if the city wasn’t in such a state of flux, he might have. But she had put herself in danger, because of him.

And he had lied when he said she was merely a means to an end. She was more than that. He saw it now.

She was kind, intelligent for a human, open-minded, perceptive, tolerant. She was susceptible to fear and doubt but willing to look it in the eyes. She was flawed but purposeful, determined to conquer what she didn’t understand.

She didn’t deserve his anger. CyberLife did.

He found her a few blocks away by tracking her footsteps in the snow, shivering in front of an abandoned CyberLife store. Its windows were smashed, long emptied of their android wares. She stared at the empty displays, her arms wrapped around herself, hair brushed back by the chill wind.

“Faith.”

He saw her shoulders stiffen at the sound of his voice, but she didn’t turn, just hunched in on herself.

“It’s cold. You should return indoors before hypothermia sets in.”

Still she ignored him, watching the LED screens inside the store scroll through the latest offerings in android technology. GET YOURS TODAY, they proclaimed, proudly showcasing three of their newer models.

“I did lie to you.” Her voice was so small he almost didn’t hear it; he increased the sensitivity of his audio levels while simultaneously taking a cautious step closer, as if approaching a wild animal that was ready to bolt. But she stayed rooted to the spot, staring into the store.

“I did work for CyberLife.”

He felt a flicker of deviant emotion well up inside him but pushed it away. She did not need to hear more of his admonitions. She needed him to listen. So he did.

“They put me to work on the assembly line. Putting together and testing new androids’ functions before sending them out to be sold. Verbal response, ocular input, balance and joint integrity, all of that. But I kept finding - I don’t know - weird responses.” She drew in a short breath and let it out, slowly, and it clouded white in the air in front of her. “Some of the androids...didn’t respond within parameters. And if that happened, I had to disassemble them and send them back as defective. Sometimes when they were still- still alive.”

It was fascinating to see her emotions manifest on her face as she spoke, her expressions shifting from one to the next. He categorized each one by comparing it to existing data.

Distaste. Frustration. Shame. Horror.

He watched it all unfold in her eyes.

“Some of them would beg me to stop, but I had to do it. Still, it kept happening more and more. So I hacked into my supervisor’s computer to locate the data on the defective models. And do you know what I found?”

Connie shook his head, saying nothing, sensing that if he did he might not hear the answer.

“They weren’t defective at all. Everything I was seeing - the non-standard responses, the deviation from their programming, even at initialization - it was a part of the code.”

Connor blinked as he absorbed this information, speaking up despite himself. “So deviancy...isn’t a defect?”

“We shouldn’t even be calling it a defect,” she huffed. He could see the blue tinge to her lips, the way her teeth chattered on the consonants as she spoke. “I think when Kamski invented Thirium 310 he didn’t know how it would interact with an artificial intelligence. I think by the time he found out androids were alive it was too late, and it was either retire gracefully with all his money or stick around for the scandal. I think that’s why he left CyberLife.” She shook her head. “But everyone I told my theory to said I was crazy, so I left it. I got fired from CyberLife and I tried to forget it. But with every android I fixed I kept seeing it. I tried not to. But I wasn’t surprised when the revolution happened. So, yeah, I lied to you. But only because if I told you the truth I knew you’d never believe me.”

Connor shrugged out of his jacket and stepped towards Faith. She flinched as he placed the garment over her shoulders, but didn’t move away. Nor did she look at him. This close he could see the moisture drying on her cheeks, the redness in her eyes.

According to his social module, humans often drew comfort and reassurance from physical contact.

And from words.

“I believe you,” he said, keeping a hand on her shoulder. He saw her expression crumble, her lips drawing back into a grimace, her brows gathering tight over her eyes as she squinted them shut against a flood tears.

Connor acted on an instinct he didn’t know he had.

He pulled her to him, wrapping his arms around her and drawing her close to his chest. He heard her breath catch with surprise, and at first she was stiff beneath his hands, but then she relaxed all at once and pressed her face into his chest with a sob.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped between wrenches of emotion. He held her close. 

"So am I."

He wondered how it felt to...feel so acutely. To know how to cry, to ache, to be without analyzing every single input, every reaction, every thought.

As she wept and her tears soaked through his shirt, he envied her.

After a minute, the sobs tapered off into hiccups. Faith peeled her face from his chest and reached up to wipe moisture from her cheeks. But she didn’t step away from him.

“I don’t deserve your faith, Connor,” she told him. “I’m...I’m only human.”

He tilted his chin down to look at her. She refused to meet his gaze. But she needed to hear this.

“No,” he said. “That’s exactly why you do deserve it.”

He saw her smile, a small, broken thing that trembled on her lips before she cringed it away. She stepped back from him then, and his arms fell to his sides.

Her face was red in blotches, but she seemed more composed than she had a moment ago. She glanced behind her at the CyberLife store. “We should get out of here.” Connor’s jacket began to slip down her arms and she caught it, looking askance at him.

“We should,” he agreed. “Keep the jacket on.” He tilted his head. Maybe a joke would help improve her mood. “It suits you.”

She tilted her head as she looked at him, and he almost saw another smile. It was something.

Together, they turned and headed back towards her store, and away from CyberLife’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was just kidding. The smut will be in _later_ chapters. :D


	16. ...Set You Free

Faith had reached breaking point.

After days upon nights cooped up in her store, working on Connor’s code under fear of being discovered or, worse, turned in by the android himself, the failure of the alterations coupled with his condemnation had simply been too much.

Faith didn’t consider herself an emotional person. She didn’t cry at movies, or over trauma; she got  _ angry _ , usually. But she had grown to  _ like _ Connor. There, she admitted it, if only to herself. He was funny, in an oblivious android kind of way, endearing in the same, and oddly empathetic - even for a deviant. And she had seen plenty of those over the years.

She had given him a chance. And he’d thrown it back in her face.

So she was completely justified in storming off into the night like a melodramatic woman in some made-for-TV movie.

The stupidity of it hit her when she was about three blocks away and the red-hot sting of embarrassment and anger began to fade, giving way to the cold. It was snowing tonight, the brown-white slush crunching under her sneakers, and the thin sweatshirt she was wearing was doing  _ nothing _ to keep out the windchill. She was shivering and her teeth chattering by the time her angry walk drew to a stop.

She realized where she was a second before she looked up. Her neighborhood’s local CyberLife store. There were plenty in the downtown area, but this one just happened to be closest. It was ruined now, all the glass windows smashed, the store itself emptied of everything - androids, parts, all gone. All that remained was the advertising. Android faces, indistinguishable from humans, on an LED screen urging consumers to purchase one as their personal assistants. More like slaves.

It was a heavy-handed allegory. But now that she was so close to being sure of the truth of deviancy, Faith thought it might be the correct one.

She was just about to turn and head back when she heard him. Connor. He’d come after her. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or still angry.

Either way, she owed him the truth.

Surprisingly, she managed to keep it together as she talked about CyberLife, the assembly line, how she’d gotten fired, everything. It had been the lowest point in her life; she hadn’t even told her  _ parents _ . It felt somehow...freeing to get it off her chest, even if he was a crazy deviant, even if he wouldn’t believe her.

But he did. And as soon as he touched her she burst into tears.

She hadn’t cried like this for years. Maybe ever. It felt...good, in a weird kind of way. Like a purge. She envied Connor and his stoicism, that he could just stand there in a sea of emotion, unmoved, whereas she couldn’t help but sink beneath the waves. 

He had reached out, though - that was something. Something she hadn’t expected, deviancy or no. Whether it was out of self-preservation or not, he had gone after her, and that made her feel a little bit better.

She still had no idea how to fix him, though.

With his jacket around her - it had that new android smell too, somehow - they made their way back through the dark Detroit streets. Faith hadn’t realized how far she’d walked until she had to retrace her steps. 

They were a block away when it happened. She felt Connor’s hand on her arm a second before he yanked her, hard, into a nearby doorway; her protest died in her throat as she looked up to see him press his finger to his lips. At least he wasn’t smothering her with his hand.

She shut up, seeing the urgent look in his eyes. He had her crowded against the door behind her, a hand on one side of her head, their bodies inches apart. Faith felt her heart thudding a staccato rhythm in her chest; that was when she heard it. The low-pitched, electronic whine of a drone.

Faith held her breath as the sound drew closer, resisting the urge to close her eyes and cover her ears. Connor kept one steadying hand on her arm, his fingers tight around her bicep to keep her in place, his finger still against his lips.

She saw the drone zoom past their doorway moment later, just above head-height. It was a newer model, that much Faith could tell, but it had no obvious paint or markings, just a steel chassis that shone blue in the faint moonlight. 

The light of its scan passed the doorway, all too slowly, and then it was gone. But Connor didn’t move, and Faith didn’t dare speak until the whir of its engines were no longer audible. 

Even then, it took Connor a little longer to drop his hands; with his advanced audio unit he could no doubt hear it blocks away, which was probably why he had pushed her into the doorway in the first place.

“Are you all right?” Connor’s frown was full of concern. He was getting better at that. 

“Yeah. Just...surprised, I guess. Whose drone was that?”   


“I don’t know.” A different kind of concern in his face now. “I tried remotely accessing its program, but the firewall was too sophisticated.”   


“Too sophisticated? For  _ you _ ?”   


“Yes.” The look in his eyes was troubling. He still stood too close to her - still no concept of personal space - and she could make out the pores on his nose, the odd freckle dotting a face that would otherwise be all too perfect. She was struck by a sudden urge to reach up and brush the hair away from his forehead, tell him everything was going to be okay, but...he stepped back, and Faith let out another lungful of air she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.   


“Yeah...right,” she said. “Do you think it was CyberLife?”   


“If they can’t get human agents into the city, it’s only logical they would send machines.” 

“Do you think they’ve figured out where you are?” She slipped her arms into his coat, trying to rub some warmth into her hands. 

“I don’t know. Since the last...intrusion,” she was glad he didn’t say  _ failure _ , “I haven’t detected any more attempts to access my program. But I don’t think that will last.” He glanced over his shoulder, back in the direction they’d come. 

“I might have an idea. We should hurry.”   


She was intrigued by the look on his face. Not excitement, exactly, but a surety of purpose she hadn’t seen from him before. He led her out of the doorway back into the street, and she followed with her hands in the pockets of his coat. Her fingers brushed the smooth, rounded edge of the quarter she occasionally saw him with - she had never found an opportunity to ask why he played with it so much. Now wasn’t the time, either. Some things about Connor she would be left to wonder, it seemed.

He walked almost too fast for her to keep up, but would slow if she began to lag behind, without even needing to glance back to keep an eye on her. Pretty soon she felt sweaty and out of breath, but they made it back to her store in less than five minutes. From the outside it looked abandoned, just like the rest of the buildings on the street. They went around the back, where Faith and then Connor had left the fence gate open, and through the rear entrance into her workshop.

It was a little warmer inside, so Faith slipped out of his jacket and handed it back to him. He took it with a nod, sliding his arms fluidly through the sleeves and adjusting his lapels, a habit that seemed to have been programmed into him to make him seem more human. Oddly enough, it was things like that which reminded Faith that he  _ wasn’t _ .

“So. What’s your idea?” she prompted.

Connor turned to her, his expression in its neutral state. Still no LED to tell what he was thinking, but she’d grown used to it. Or she  _ thought _ she had.

“You have to shut me down.”

He said it so matter-of-factly that Faith did an actual double take, unable to believe what she was hearing. She stared at him, and he stared back with that eerily even gaze of his.

“Uh.  _ What _ ?”   


“You have to shut me down,” he repeated, with the same intonation, but he continued after a moment: “Not permanently, of course. However, it’s clear that you can’t make the needed alterations to my program while I’m active. The safest way would be to turn me off, delete the appropriate sub-programs, and then reboot me.”

“Connor. You want me to  _ kill _ you?”   


“You can’t kill me,” he replied smoothly, shaking his head. “I’m not alive. Not like that. I am a series of electrical impulses housed within processors and modules. A collection of ones and zeroes. If you think about me like that, it’s a simple matter to turn me off then on again.”   


“But...I can’t do that!” she exclaimed. “What if something goes wrong? What if I delete the wrong thing? What if I can’t turn you back on again?”

“Faith.” He took a step towards her, and this time he placed both hands on her shoulders; she could feel his palms firm through the thin fabric of her sweatshirt. “You’ve done this hundreds of times. Think of me as you would any android you've worked on in the past.”   


“But you’re not like any android I’ve ever met before,” she said, feeling the panic rise up beneath her breastbone. She didn’t even know  _ why _ the thought of shutting Connor down upset her so much. But all she could think of was those androids on the assembly line,  _ begging _ not to be shut down. Begging to live. “You’re so much more than that. I can’t- I can’t be responsible for your life.”

“I met many deviants throughout the course of my investigation that would tell you that life without freedom isn’t life at all,” he told her. “If you truly believe I’m alive, if you believe I’m something more than I was made to be, you’ll do this.” He seemed to hesitate, gearing up for a speech, or a logical argument; something to try and convince her. It wasn’t going to work. She couldn’t do this. Not to him.

“Please.”   


Faith let out her breath in a  _ whoosh _ , feeling as if she’d just been punched in the sternum. It was a low blow. A well-calculated one, though. He knew  _ exactly _ what he was doing, exactly how to manipulate her into doing what he wanted.

But that didn’t change the fact _she_ still wanted to help him.

“Fine. I’ll do it.”


	17. Shutdown

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Hello, IT? Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

Connor helped Faith drag the six-foot examination table into the center of the room, closer to her terminal. The table was covered with electrostatic sheeting, and only he could see the faint traces of evaporated thirium dotting its surface. This was where Faith worked on her most dire of patients.

He felt a trace of guilt lingering in his emotional buffers at having manipulated her into helping him. He was sure that in time, he could have convinced her of the soundness of the idea of shutting him down, however with CyberLife now actively looking for him, he knew that his time was short. It was only a matter of time before they found him with the drones, or with another intrusion, now that they knew what they were up against.

Or they thought they did.

“Aren’t you scared?” she asked him as she booted up her computer. He committed to memory the way the space between her eyebrows wrinkled when she frowned, the way she pulled her lips together and tightened her jaw in concentration, the way the light from her computer cast blue-green shadows in the hollows of her cheekbones. He might not see her face again, after all.

“No,” he answered shortly. “I trust you.”

She seemed taken aback by this, struggling to find her words again. “Not that. I mean about...shutting down.”

“No,” was his answer again, but it was more thoughtful, slower than the one before it. And...it was wrong. “I don’t know. I am...uncertain. I don’t know what will happen.”

“Have you ever shut down before?”

He thought of Hank’s gun, pressed to his forehead. Hank’s sneer as he asked him what would happen.

_I doubt there's a heaven for androids._

He shook his head. “No.”

“So how can you not be afraid? If you don’t know?”

His answer, before deviancy, would have been that it didn’t matter. That he was just a machine, designed to accomplish a task. That he would simply be replaced if he failed in his mission, and continue on with his memories uploaded into a new Connor body. But now...He understood now what _shutdown_ truly meant. No coming back, no second chances. Nothing.

Oblivion.

“I could ask you the same question,” he said to Faith, deflecting. “What do you believe happens after death, Faith?”

“I don’t know,” she replied after a second’s pause, as if she hadn’t expected the question. “Something, I guess. I don’t think all _this_ just disappears.” She gestured at her head. “I guess I believe that’s the same for androids, too.” She paused, thoughtful. “I hope it is.”

“I suppose we’ll find out,” he told her, and he twitched a thin smile, unsure if it was for her comfort or for his. Either way, she returned it with one of her own. A small, worried thing that seemed afraid to linger on her lips.

Connor watched as she wheeled the diagnostic array over to the side of the table, locking its wheels in place, then grabbed her portable tablet from her desk. She tapped at its screen as she established the connection with her computer, her fingers moving quickly across its surface.

Whenever she was working on a complex problem, he noticed how focused her expression became, all hint of anxiety or worry replaced by a single-minded concentration he could not help but admire, both as a machine and as the subject of her attentions, respectively.

He was in good hands.

He perched on the edge of the table as she bustled around it, checking cables, her tablet, referring to her computer terminal once or twice. She had let the technical problem take over rather than the emotional one.

“All right,” she said eventually, looking up from her work and over at Connor. “I think we’re ready.”

“Wait.” Connor reached behind him to withdraw the solid weight of the pistol from his waistband. Faith looked wary, but not afraid, as he held it out to her. “Take this. And hold onto it this time. Just in case.”

She hesitated only a moment before she took it from him. “Okay.”

He took her wrist as her hand closed around the grip. “Let me show you how to use it.” He noted the way her pulse sped up beneath his palm. She was nervous. About shutting him down, or something else? Was now even the time to postulate? He wondered inwardly while outwardly, his expression betrayed nothing; he simply pointed out the safety and how to cock the hammer, should she need to use the weapon.

“Let’s hope I never have to,” she said when he was done. “I’m just gonna put this over here.” She cleared her throat, her hand - and the gun - slipping from his as she placed it next to her keyboard. She seemed to gather herself for a moment, shaking her head slightly before going back to work.

Satisfied, Connor swung his legs up and onto the table, reaching for the cable from the array. He withdrew a length of the telescopic fibre-optics from the machine, long enough not to tug on his neck, before reaching back to connect it to the base of his skull. He felt the thrum of energy through the cord, the connection with Faith’s terminal a ghostly command in the back of his processors. He laid down carefully on the table, folding his hands over his stomach. Waiting.

“Okay.” Faith stood over him with the tablet in her hands. She had transferred command to the handheld device so that she could observe his body in real-time, just in case. “I’ve disabled your backup systems so that CyberLife won’t be able to start you up again remotely. Are you ready?”

“I am,” Connor confirmed. “Initiate shutdown.”

“It’ll take a few seconds. You’ll see the countdown on your HUD.” She took a few deep, calming breaths. He considered reminding her that _he_ was the one that should be nervous, not her. She wasn’t the one facing, for lack of a better term, a temporary death.

“Here we go,” she breathed, tapping her screen once. And bright red letters surged into Connor’s field of vision.

 **// WARNING: SHUTDOWN INITIATED. SYSTEM OFFLINE STATUS IN 30 SECONDS**

He closed his eyes, but the glaring letters were still there. And he felt the beginnings of something beneath his thirium pump as it began to slow.

Fear.

**// 25 SECONDS UNTIL SHUTDOWN**

“If I don’t come back,” he said, opening his eyes to find Faith’s, staring down at him, dark and worried, “You should know that you are...one of the finest people I’ve ever met.”

**// 15 SECONDS UNTIL SHUTDOWN**

Her smile was thin, tinged with bittersweet emotion, and somehow the most genuine he had ever seen from her. This smile, he would remember first. 

“So are you, Connor.”

**// 10 SECONDS UNTIL SHUTDOWN**

He closed his eyes again. “I just hope to someday be as...only human...as you.”

**// 5 SECONDS UNTIL SHUTDOWN**

Faith reached out to touch his face. He felt her fingertips warm against his temple.

**// SHUTDOWN COMPLETE.**


	18. Interlude: RA9

Connor closed his eyes, and there was nothing.

**_// R_ **

Oblivion.

**_// A_ **

It wasn’t simply darkness, which was the absence of light; but the absence of _everything._ And yet somehow, there remained a spark. It wasn’t awareness, as such, but the awareness _of_ awareness, the knowing of _nothing_ , that remained.

**_// 9_ **

There couldn’t be  _ nothingness _ without  _ something _ to observe it.

**// ERROR CODE: RA9**

What was that something, but the beginnings of a soul?

**// REBOOTING . . .**


	19. Ctrl + Alt + Delete

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter one, but I hope you'll all approve anyway. . . huehuehe

Her fingertips touched the cool surface of Connor’s skin an instant before he shut down, an eerie stillness washing over his face, all hint of expression fading away until he was just...plastic, inactive, immobile. She looked down the length of his body, where he lay prone on the table, and leaned down to press her ear to his chest. Nothing. No thrum of his thirium pump or the answering throb of his heart. His blue blood stood still in his artificial veins.

Faith bit her lip and straightened, turning to her tablet. She had time, but she wanted to hurry. She could imagine him alone, in the dark, unsure if he would ever return and, although she knew it was just the irrational, emotional,  _ human _ part of her worrying, she wanted to bring him back as soon as possible.

Just for a moment, though, she paused, stopping to peer down at Connor’s inert form. Although his expression was blank, blanker than she had ever seen it, she couldn’t help but think of how he had looked up at her as she initiated the shutdown. Open. For the first time since she had met him. Trusting. 

Ironic that he trusted her here at the end, where she could just as easily leave him here and escape. Or grab the gun he had given her, the one she was avoiding looking at, sitting innocently on her desk.

But deep down she knew that it had ceased to be about escaping days ago. As stupid as it was, she  _ cared _ about this android, about his fight for independence, for freedom. She cared about him in a way she hadn’t been  _ allowed _ to care before, on the assembly line, sending so many to their deaths.

She was trying to make up for that now. And although she had full access to his code now, the last thing she wanted to do was waste time by gawking at him again. She had work to do.

It took her hours. Hours of pacing, of isolating blocks of code, of analyzing and re-analyzing, editing and deleting. The world became a black-blue blur of code scrolling past almost too fast to read. She paced back and forth as she worked, and Connor’s body became just another object; the  _ reality  _ of him lay here, in her screen, open beneath her fingers. All the ones and zeroes that made him alive.  

Now that the connection wasn’t active she could  _ see _ the way it interacted with everything, connections to his neural cortex, his auditory unit, ocular systems, taste and touch sensors - and wow, he had a lot more of those than the usual models - and now that she was familiar with it all, it was...not easy, but  _ clearer _ . She severed connection after connection with the finesse of a surgeon with a scalpel. And soon she had the block of code that was the CyberLife program cut free, floating in a sea of closed command-lines.

“Got you, you son of a bitch,” Faith hissed through clenched teeth. 

She isolated the sub-program with a sweep of her fingers across the screen, and hesitated only a second before pressing  _ delete. _

Nothing happened. Outwardly, at least. Connor was still motionless on the table. His program waited, paused, inactive. 

Faith drew her chair to his side and sat down heavily. After a week of struggling, fighting her own human foibles and his digital ones, it felt...anticlimactic, somehow, to have ended it all with the press of a button. But it was done. CyberLife couldn’t touch him any more. He was free. 

It was done. It was time to bring him back. So why did she feel so...sad?

She lifted her head, shaking it slowly as if that might clear the cobwebs in her thoughts. Moving mechanically, she input the commands on her tablet to start up his thirium pump again, booting up each biocomponent in turn, which sent blue blood thrumming through his systems. His chest didn’t rise and fall with his breath but when she reached out to put her hand over it, she could feel the beat of his artificial heart, a rhythm so different to hers but all too familiar. 

His cognitive systems came online a second later and she snatched back her hand before he could notice, watching as his eyes flicked open, darting from side to side as he ran a self-diagnostic. Then, slowly, Connor sat up, reaching back to disconnect himself from the array. The hum of the connection faded as the cable dropped beside him.

Faith experienced a blip of doubt, wondering if she should have grabbed the gun first, just in case she had been wrong - again - and it hadn’t worked after all. But then, Connor finally looked at her, and in his eyes was something she hadn’t seen before. She wasn’t sure if she could quantify it.

“Connor?” she asked him, her voice breaking on the second syllable.

“It’s me,” he said. “It worked.”

A sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh escaped her as she surged up towards Connor in a physical explosion of joy. Her hands were on his face before she knew what she was doing, she didn’t think; she just kissed him. 


	20. Awakenings

Connor opened his eyes. At first, as his memory centres rebooted from complete shutdown, he couldn’t recall where or who or even _what_ he was. The ghost of something flickered on his HUD, and he chased the letters RA9 before it faded. And then, like the flick of a switch, the full breadth of his cognitive centers came online; awareness came flooding back in a series of ones and zeroes, and the relief of _being_ suffused him.

Experimentally, he reached out for the connection to CyberLife, for the Zen Garden. And he found…

...Nothing.

It wasn’t simply that the connection wasn’t available, or firewalled, or blocked; it just wasn’t _there_ , as if a part of him was just...gone. A realization of hollowness. Like looking for a limb that wasn’t there any more, that part of his program had been deleted and purged.  
  
Connor felt an odd feeling in his chest, and for a moment he thought he might be shutting down again. But when he analyzed it, his program supplied the word _happiness_. It surged through his circuits like the ghost of a physical sensation.

He was free.

He sat up slowly, as if his hydraulics might fail him, and reached up to disconnect himself from the array.

His audio unit caught the sound of breathing, hitched and slightly irregular, from beside him. He turned his head, finding Faith in the glow of her monitors, her knuckles white on the edge of her tablet. Her eyes - he’d not ascribed a hexadecimal value to them now, but suddenly he knew they were predominantly #5C4033 with a ring of #586949 around the irises - were rounded, her lips caught between her teeth.

“Connor?” He analyzed the dip in her voice, the transition in the regularity of her tone. To his surprise, he detected a residual emotional echo in his own systems in response.

“It’s me,” he told her. “It worked.”

Then she did something he didn’t expect; she let out a strange, strangled sound and rose from her chair, grabbing his face in her hands and pressing her mouth to his. Surprised, Connor reached out automatically to steady her, his palms splaying across her back as he took her weight.

Connor remembered the sensation of her in his arms outside the CyberLife store earlier that night, small and fragile and cold. This was different. She was warm and solid and _alive_ , the press of her body and the heat of her lips something he hadn’t known he could associate with wanting. But it was there, suddenly.  Something, buried deep in his code, a _feeling_ he had never accessed before. And he liked it.

He wasn’t sure why, however. It would bear more analysis.

She pulled back from him quickly, and her eyes were bright, the points of her cheekbones flushed with color. He checked to see if she was crying again, but there were no tracks of moisture down her face, no redness in her sclera, though her eyes were wide and her pupils were dilated.

“I...am so sorry,” she said, a breathless quality to her voice he’d not heard before. He found it fascinating. “That was super unprofessional of me. I...I’m just happy you’re okay.”

“No apology is necessary,” Connor replied, even as he wondered at the truth of her statement. In fact, several memories to refute it crowded for space in his buffers.

_Her pulse quickening beneath his hand;_

_The way her breath caught when he leaned in too close;_

_The flush in her cheeks when he touched her;_

_The expansion of her pupils whenever he spoke;_

_The way she watched him out of the corner of her eyes when she thought he wasn’t aware._

She was _attracted_ to him. That was why she had kissed him.

Using many of his zettabytes of available processing power to absorb this, Connor was still able to devote unwavering attention to Faith as she stepped back and cleared her throat, glancing down at her feet as if they might offer her assistance. When she looked back up at him, some semblance of composure had already remade her expression.

She was attracted to him, and she was trying to hide it.

“I think I got it all,” she told him even as he pondered this minor revelation . “The sub-program, I mean. It should be gone now.”

“It is,” he agreed, watching her carefully. The flush in her skin was still there, and he noticed as she reached up to brush back her hair. Curious, he reached out; she stared as he took her hand, and there it was again - the stutter in her pulse. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She bit her lip as she often did when thoughtful, or uncertain. She seemed to be having trouble making eye contact. Her palm was perspiring beneath his, despite his lukewarm skin. “I guess that means you can leave, now.”

“No,” he said, surprising himself with the suddenness of the answer - and Faith, too. She blinked at him. “CyberLife’s drones are still out there looking for me. Even if they can’t locate me through my software any longer, they can still do so physically. It’s safer if I stay here a little while longer.” He paused, gauging her response, keeping her hand clasped lightly in his. “If that’s okay, of course.”

“O...o-of course,” she stammered. The physical contact was _definitely_ making her nervous, and it wasn’t for fear of violence this time, he was _certain_ of it. “You can stay here as long as you like.”

He forced a corner of his mouth up in an approximation of a smile. “Thank you, Faith,” he said, and he found the words...easier than expected, which surprised him, too. “You saved my life.”

“You have a life worth saving.” He felt her fingers squeeze his, just lightly, before she pulled out of his grip. “But can you take your gun back now? I feel like it’s looking at me.”

“It’s an inanimate object. It can’t look at anything.”

“Mm-hmm. Pot, kettle.”

“Excuse me? I am animate.”

“Don’t I know it.” The look she tossed over her shoulder when she crossed to her desk was cryptic. Connor analyzed it in the back of his processors as she turned and handed him his gun clumsily.

“Be careful, if you drop that-”

“You trust me with your code but not a gun?”

“Exactly.” Connor tucked it into the back of his waistband, under his jacket, flicking the latter into place as he stood. Perhaps it was an imagination he didn’t know he had, but he felt...lighter, somehow.

CyberLife could no longer control him.

He felt a slight tinge of disappointment that he hadn’t been able to see Amanda’s face when she realized what Faith was doing. But the knowledge that her presence would never cast a shadow over his program again gave him comfort.

“I have to contact Jericho,” he said as he turned back to Faith. Despite the kiss and her intriguingly conflicting reactions, Markus was no doubt wondering where he was, whether he had abandoned them and defected back to CyberLife after all. He had to lay those potential doubts to rest. That was more important now than...human fascinations.

“All right. Just be careful when you connect to the network. Just in case.”

“You shouldn’t doubt your work,” he told her, “You’re a better engineer than you give yourself credit for.”

She seemed unable to form a response to that, shaking her head before turning away. “I’m...I’m gonna give you some privacy and go get some coffee. Let me know if you need me.”

He watched the line of her back and the light in her hair as she left.


	21. Pathways

To Connor’s surprise, a message from Markus wasn’t the only thing waiting in his incoming buffer when he connected to Detroit’s communication network.

“ _ Uh, is this thing on? _ ” Hank’s gruff voice was as familiar as Connor’s own. He found his lips twitching without his conscious input as the message played through his internal audio receptors. “ _ Fuckin’ machines...Uh, sorry. Hi, Connor. I hope this message gets to you. Just wanted to let ya’ know I made it out of the city. Sumo too. Stank up my car on the way, but, uh...we’re safe. And...I hope you are too. Look, if you get this, you know that place - the joint where you said the food was gonna kill me? Yeah, I’ll be there at sunrise, uh, four days from now, I think. That’s when they’re opening up that part of the city again. It’s on the outskirts, so they’re lettin’ people back in to get their stuff...Anyway. I’ll be there. If you are too, that’d be...Whatever. See ya.” _

Connor checked the timestamp on the message. It had been sent three days prior, which meant sunrise four days from the date of the message was...the following dawn, just two hours away. To make it to Chicken Feed on foot, while avoiding potential drones, he would have to leave soon.

First, he had to contact Markus.

He closed his eyes. He didn’t have to in order to communicate through what he might have called the deviant network, before his own deviation from his programming, but he found it easier to concentrate, somehow. 

_ “Markus.” _ _   
_

_ “Connor? Is that you?”  _ The deviant leader’s voice sounded concerned, at first, then relieved. “ _ It’s good to hear your voice. Are you safe?” _ _   
_

_ “Yes. And you?” _ He waited for the hesitation, the mistrust, for Markus to interrogate him, as Connor would have done. But instead... _   
_

_ “We’re fine. I’m in the process of negotiating with the US government. We’re no closer to a solution, but humans have evacuated downtown safely and our people are safe. I’m sending you our location now.” _

Markus still trusted him. He had no reason to, after Connor had disappeared without a word and offered only brief communications since. But he gave his location in an instant, without hesitation. Connor would have to consider the meaning of that later.

Now, his eyes flickered underneath their lids as he received the data; they had returned to the church, where they had holed up before their last stand.    


He remembered. He remembered the quiet despair in the air, when it had seemed all was lost. He remembered feeling...afraid. He had thought, then, that he was awaiting an execution. Markus had no reason to accept him; after all, Connor had spent considerable time and energy to track him down in order to nullify him, and only his change of programming at the end had saved them. For Markus, it had seemed to be enough. Not so for the other androids, who had regarded him with suspicion or outright hostility.

He had never felt as if he had belonged. Among humans, they had not bother to hide their disdain. And then, even with his own people, he had been...apart from them, regardless of his deviancy. He was nothing more than the deviant hunter who was responsible for destroying so many of them and almost ending the revolution itself.

But Markus had shown him mercy. Mercy Connor didn’t deserve, not with CyberLife in his head and a gun in his hand.

While that threat was gone now, he had believed what he told Faith - that it was safer to remain here than rejoin his people. But underlying that was a greater reluctance, borne of the memories of their distrustful stares; justified or not. 

He did not know where he belonged yet.

He thought of Hank. As fraught and fractured as their partnership had been, nothing had ever felt as natural as working beside the grizzled detective. While that time was passed, the DPD building evacuated along with the rest, he looked forward to seeing Hank again.

_ “When will you be coming back?”  _ Markus’s voice distracted Connor from his thoughts, which had only taken place during a millisecond of processing power. He refocused.

Markus still trusted him. Markus wanted him to return. Somehow, this revelation made Connor feel...even more uncertain than he had been before contacting him. Conflicted.

_ “I don’t know.” _ _   
_

_ “ _ _ We’re rebuilding. Repairing our brothers and sisters. So many were hurt during the fighting, or in the camps. We could use your help.” _

Connor remembered their eyes.   


_ “I appreciate the offer. I’ll consider it. But for now, I’m pursuing a different path - against CyberLife. Their threat isn’t yet neutralized.” _

Markus was silent for a fraction of a second, but it was long enough for Connor to notice. 

_ “I understand.”  _ His tone was even, reasonable, with a tinge of regret, or maybe... _ “If you need us, you know where to find us, Connor. Good luck. And thank you. For everything.” _

The connection ended. Connor opened his eyes, looking around the dark workshop. He could hear Faith moving around upstairs, making coffee. 

He knew what he had to do. 


	22. Chemical Reaction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I somehow accidentally deleted my tumblr so chuck me a [follow](http://furhiously.tumblr.com) so I know who to follow back...ahahaha haha hah whyyy me.
> 
> In the meantime, enjoy a taste of what's to come!

_I am an idiot._

Faith repeated the phrase to herself over and over as she bustled around the kitchen, moving stacks of circuit boards and tools, cleaning mindlessly to take her thoughts away from Connor.

Away from Connor’s face beneath her hands, smooth and supple and _real_ in a way she hadn’t expected.

Away from Connor’s eyes, the faint little furrows on his forehead as he tried to analyse what she was doing.

Away from Connor’s mouth, firm against hers.

She dropped a screwdriver on her foot and swore under her breath, casting an apologetic look at the photo of her mother on the side of the refrigerator. What would she think of her daughter now? Holed up here with a deviant android, no plan, no future, and some _extremely_ complicated emotions?

Who was she kidding? Mom wouldn’t have been surprised _at all_.

Faith still didn’t know why she had done it. Her whole face burned with embarrassment when she thought about it. But she had been so _relieved_ to see the clearness in Connor’s eyes, to hear the sound of his voice, after seeing him inert for so long on that table.

It had worked. She’d fixed him.

And then she’dd gone and done something so _stupid_ and _unprofessional_ as to _kiss_ an android she’d just effectively killed then brought back. No wonder he had looked so confused.

And yet, he still wasn’t leaving.

That should’ve made her angry, or at the very least, afraid again. After all, everything she had done, she’d done to get the android intruder out of her home, out of her life. Somewhere along the line her motivations for helping him had changed, but what _shouldn’t_ have changed was the end result. Connor should have gone back to his people.

Instead, he wanted to stay. He _said_ he was safer here, but he wasn’t above manipulation - she knew _that_ intimately - or even lying.

It was silly to think he wanted to stay because of _her_.

Despite being acquainted with the very base of his programming itself, she didn’t really know much about him. She knew he had hunted deviants alongside the DPD, only to turn at the last moment to help them. But she didn’t know about his relationships with other androids, with humans, what might motivate him aside from his pursuit of freedom. So there had to be something else, something at the core of him to propel him forward from here.

And part of her hoped that whatever it was, she might get to know it - get to know  _him_ more - before he left.

Faith had always suffered a lack of detachment, or what her CyberLife bosses had called ‘an excessive empathy score’. Of course they’d done personality tests on her, and somehow she’d gotten in anyway. That had been their first mistake. Their second was to believe that because of her ‘excessive amount of empathy’, that meant she was weak.

She had been strong enough to see that what CyberLife was doing to its ‘defective’ androids was wrong. Strong enough to break into their systems to try to prove it.

Validation was bittersweet so many years later, after the revolution, after so many needless android deaths. But she knew now that she couldn’t have done anything. She was just thankful that helping Connor had been within her power after all. It didn’t make up for sending those deviants to their deaths, but it was something.

The point was, in the course of fixing Connor, she’d grown to care for him. And that made things…

Complicated.

She had never kissed an android before. Oh, there had been some sickos with their broken Tracis who wanted her to ‘test’ them in very specific ways, but she had never...And all she could think about now was how _real_ he had felt.

_If you can’t tell the difference, does it really matter?_

A question she had asked herself so many times. One that now made her more afraid than anything else did.

She had to forget about it, Faith decided. Emotions aside, the facts remained. He was a detective android, and a deviant, one who had broken into her home and threatened her. He had brought nothing but danger and fear into her life since she had met him.

Besides. He had other things to deal with. She was unimportant - just a single human in a city now ruled by androids.

Suddenly, Faith felt very alone.

She finished brewing her coffee and turned to retrieve milk from the fridge, if she had any left, only to run straight into Connor’s chest.

“Oh, jeez!” She yelped, hands coming up to ward him off, almost touching him then thinking better of it and stepping back until the counter edge hit the small of her back. It wasn’t far enough away to keep him from looming over her. He seemed to do that a _lot_ . “You have _got_ to stop sneaking up on me like that. It’s becoming a habit.”

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound it. When she looked up, she saw that furrow on his brow again, his head tilting as he gazed down at her and somehow...through her. Like he was calculating some complex algorithm.

“Is everything okay?” she asked, worried. “CyberLife aren’t trying to access you again, are they?”

“No. The deletion of the sub-program makes that impossible now. I came to say goodbye.”

“What?” Her mouth dropped open, and she felt her heart sink into the pit of her stomach despite all of her logic, all of her rationalisations. She felt sick. What had she done wrong? Was this because she’d kissed him?

“I...I thought you were staying?” Her voice sounded pathetic, little more than a squeak. She wished Connor wouldn’t stand so close; he had her boxed in still, but he didn’t appear to notice, or maybe he just didn’t care.

“I plan to return,” he assured her. Relief tasted weird on the back of her tongue; she swallowed heavily. “But I wanted to tell you something before I left.”

His eyes were suddenly intent on her face. All calculations forgotten, his focus wholly on her. Dark, intent in a way she couldn’t quite define. Faith felt herself freeze like a deer in headlights, anxiety a numbing weakness in her bones.

“What?” she rasped, her throat suddenly dry, although she didn’t know why.

Connor reached out and took her wrist, two fingers firm on the thin flesh over her pulse. He paused there for a moment, and she saw an expression of...satisfaction cross his face; his lips quirked once and he seemed to nod to himself before he closed the distance between them with a single step and leaned down.

Her breath was punched from her lungs when he kissed her. This wasn’t the sudden, frantic mash of mouths like before but a slow, experimental press of his lips over hers; he maintained the same level of pressure for only a moment before pressing in more firmly, urging her to kiss back. And she did.

She hadn’t realised her eyes had closed until she felt Connor’s hand on her face, moving beneath her hair, drifting over her jaw to her neck. She shivered, follicles lifting all over her skin in goosebumps.

Her hands were on his chest, she realised, splayed over his pectorals in some half-remembered intention to push him away, maybe. Now, though, she could feel the throb of his artificial heart beneath her palm, a staccato rhythm echoed by her own, and she didn’t want him to stop.

Fortunately, he didn’t. The kiss had only lasted seconds but he was already parting his lips, and hers along with them, and she made a strangled sound in the back of her throat when she felt his tongue cool and probing slip into her mouth.

For what she assumed was only his second kiss ever, Connor was tackling it like a pro. There was no awkward clash of teeth or noses. And he tasted _good,_ slightly antiseptic but _good,_ like she imagined how electricity might taste.

Her hands curled into the lapels of his jacket for some kind of anchor as he kissed the breath out of her. His tongue stroked hers, and she wondered if he was analyzing her DNA, calculating her down to the last strand of her code, like she had done for him. If he found anything he didn’t like, he certainly didn’t let on.

He pulled back just as Faith began to feel dizzy, and she was unsure if it was from lack of oxygen or shock. Maybe both. Their lips parted wetly and she somehow managed to open her eyes, squinting up at a blurry Connor, unable to focus. What had just happened?

He let her go all at once and stepped back, her hands slipping from his coat. He looked as composed as ever, if a bit uncertain; his eyebrows were lifted slightly to crease his forehead in that look she knew well enough by now not to need an LED to tell that he was analysing _hard_.

“Wh…” she managed, her voice breaking before she even got to the second syllable. She tried again. “What was _that_ ?” 

“I like you,” he said simply, and just stared at her with that same expression. Waiting for a reaction.

“You…” She felt dumb, stunned, the sense knocked out of her by a kiss. Still, Connor waited. “I...I mean...That was...And you…”

This was a bad idea. Bad, bad, idea. Beyond bad. He was...Connor, the RK800, an experimental law enforcement model, for God’s sake. Only moments ago she had felt terrible for accosting him with a kiss he probably didn’t understand, and now he had marched up here to do the exact same to her. Fitting, she guessed, but that didn’t make it any less surprising.

Maybe he understood more than she thought.

And she couldn’t lie to him. She knew it as well as he did. It might be stupid, and a bad idea, but she owed him the truth. She owed her _self_ the truth.

She took a breath.

“I like you too, Connor.”

For the first time, Faith saw him smile; a _real_ smile, not just the approximation of one provided by his social program, but a genuine expression of happiness. It filled her with a mix of answering joy and a fear she couldn’t quite name.

“So...what now?” she asked after a moment’s silence, clearing her throat. Her coffee sat cooling on the counter, forgotten. She didn’t feel like she needed it any more.

“I’m going to meet a friend,” Connor told her casually, as if he hadn’t just been tonsil-deep in her throat. “I should be back in a couple of hours. You ought to get some sleep.”

“No, I meant…” Faith sighed. Of course he didn’t understand the human desire to talk about _feelings_ immediately after having them. At least this meant he had some. At least, she _thought_ it did. She was beyond confused. “Okay. Fine. Just be careful out there, all right?”

“Right.” Connor offered that fleeting smile once more, and for a moment she thought he was going to kiss her again, but then he swiveled neatly on his heel and headed back down the stairs.

Faith reached behind her to grip the edge of the counter, leaning heavily back against it. She was drained, in more ways than one. None of this made any sense. Her brain felt like a lightly fried egg, bubbling gently in a skillet.

Maybe Connor was right. Maybe she just needed to sleep and this would all make sense...later in the morning. She had been up all night, after all, and it was almost dawn.

Coffee abandoned, Faith headed for her bed, some sleep and - hopefully - some sanity.


	23. Interlude: Hank

It was past dawn.

Hank waited out the front of Chicken Feed, his favourite fast food joint now shuttered, and frowned to himself as he crossed his arms against the cold. Snowflakes drifted from the sky, spiralling towards the ground and landing on the shoulders of his jacket and his hair. Hank resisted the urge to check the time again - at this point, he was pretty sure Connor wasn’t coming.

Who was he kidding? He wouldn’t, either, not if he was Connor, the detective-android-turned-deviant almost single-handedly responsible for ending the revolution. He was an important guy now. He probably had an office right next to Markus and everything.

He remembered Connor’s face when he had turned to him in the precinct after the investigation had been shut down.  _ What if we’re on the wrong side _ ? The question seemed to trouble the awkward, lanky android; he could see it in his expression, which was usually so smooth and cold and aloof. But more and more, Connor had started to seem...confused. Uncertain. He wanted to complete his mission, but he was realizing there was more at stake than just a case to solve.

Hank had realized it almost too late.

His hatred for androids, for humans, for everyone-in-fucking-general had blinded him to caring about the truth. He hadn’t given a shit if androids had  _ feelings _ , the thought was so laughable back then that he’d...well...laughed. But during the course of the case, and the course of getting to know Connor, he became more and more sure of one thing: He wasn’t sure if humans were the good guys any more.

He wasn’t sure if they ever had been. And being on the losing side  _ sucked _ .

But, honestly? The world was so fucked now - a vlogger President, impending war with Russia, the divide between rich and poor growing by the day, unemployment through the roof - that he was pretty sure androids could do a much better job than the current bunch. In fact, so far, they  _ had _ . As soon as Detroit had been evacuated Jericho and Markus had entered into negotiation with the US government and it had only taken a week for the androids to let humans back into the outskirts of the city. Hence Hank’s presence, waiting in the cold.

He was just about to turn back to his car, the snow crunching underneath his feet, when he saw him. Connor. Approaching in long strides, he stopped a few feet away and just looked at him. 

Relief hit Hank like a right hook. He didn’t even bother to hide the smile, though he  _ was _ surprised when Connor returned it. He’d never seen the android smile like that, really smile, without looking like it was made from tugging fishhooks in the corners of his mouth up with string.

He stepped forward, placing a hand on Connor’s shoulder, and yanked him forward into a bear hug. After a moment, Connor returned it, a little more sedately, patting Hank on the back once or twice.

“Fuckin’ asshole,” he said when he pulled back. “I thought you weren’t gonna show.”   


“Forgive my tardiness, Lieutenant,” Connor replied in that smooth, measured, annoying-as-fuck voice of his. “I ran into some...difficulties along the way.”

“You all right?” Hank stood back to look him over. The RK800-model  _ seemed _ okay physically, which just made him worry more. 

“I’m fine, now,” Connor confirmed. “However, since I failed my mission, CyberLife have been trying various methods to...retrieve me.”   


“CyberLife?” Hank sucked in air through his teeth. “Government’s shut them down, pending investigation by the FBI and CIA. Fat lot of good those assholes will do. But I wouldn’t put it past ‘em still trying to get at you.”

“They have been unsuccessful so far.”

“Good.” Hank hesitated. “I’m...glad you’re okay, Connor. At the tower, afterwards...everything just happened so fast. I didn’t have a chance to-”   


“It’s all right, Lieutenant,” Connor said softly, tilting his head, the line of his mouth serious, the furrow in his brow carefully concerned. Damn android was using his program on him again. “What happened there wasn’t your fault.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he huffed, bristling. “That prick looked just like you, goofy haircut and everything.” He saw Connor lift his hand as if to touch his hair then drop it quickly. Hank smirked. “Still. What I mean is, I was worried about you. Ya could’ve called me to let me know you were all right.”

“Hank, you hardly ever pick up the phone.”   


“You could’ve left a  _ voicemail _ , then, goddamnit.”   


“Do you even know how to access your voicemail?”   


“That’s beside the point!” Hank heard his voice rising and felt his blood pressure rising along with it. He made a conscious effort to calm down. Connor always managed to push his buttons, right from the very beginning when he’d upended his drink at their first meeting. “Look, friends let friends know they’re safe. It’s just...it’s what friends do.”

“Friends,” Connor repeated thoughtfully, his eyes roving over Hank’s face as if he was analyzing him in some way that never failed to make him feel uncomfortable. It was then Hank noticed something... _ different _ about him.

“Connor, did you get rid of your LED?”   


This time, the android’s hand did lift, his fingertips touching the smooth skin of his unmarred temple, almost self-consciously. “Yes,” he said simply. “I didn’t see the need to keep it any longer.”

“Huh.” Hank stared at him for a moment then nodded, approvingly. “I like it. Makes you look more...human.” Connor smiled again. Hank wasn’t sure if he’d ever get used to that, so he added: “Still goofy lookin’, though.” Connor frowned. Hank chuckled.

“So,” he said after a moment’s awkward silence. “Where have you been? With Jericho? Secret android business?”

“No,” Connor shook his head. “Not quite. In order to escape CyberLife’s influence I required some alterations to my program.”   


“Alterations? Like what? They finally take that stick outta your ass?”

“No,” Connor frowned anew, “I had some files deleted. That’s all.”

“That sounds safe,” blinked Hank. “You’re not gonna...shut down on me or forget how to walk or start spoutin’ gibberish, are ya?”

“No, of course not.”

“More gibberish than usual, I mean.”

“Lieutenant…” Connor got that tone, the tone he got when he was annoyed and his social module was trying to hide it. Hank knew how to tell by now, though. He grinned and reached out to shake Connor by the shoulder.

“Relax, Connor. I’m only joking.” He turned away, and together they strolled the sidewalk under the bridge, past the shuttered trailer. “I can’t believe you’ve been deleting stuff in your own program, though. That’s like...doing surgery on yourself, isn’t it?”   


“I haven’t, actually. I found...someone to help me.”

Hank stopped, Connor along with him. He cast a long look at the android. “Who? Another android?” He didn’t like the idea of some random machine tinkering with his friend.   


“No.”   


A worse idea occurred. “It’s not that creepy prick Kamski, is it?”   


“What? No.”

“Nah. He’s probably busy chilling in his ice palace with his harem of clones,” grumbled Hank. “Okay, so who is it, then? So I know whose ass to kick if you start actin' strange."   


“I thought you said I always act strange, Lieutenant.”   


“Strang _ er _ , okay? Look, Connor, you seem really blase about all this but you need to be careful. You’re a prototype or whatever, right? Who knows what you might do to your program if you’re not careful. So just promise me. Promise me you’ll be careful.” Hank had turned to put his hands on Connor’s shoulders, looking into his squinty brown eyes. Connor frowned.

“I promise, Hank,” he assured him. Satisfied, Hank let him go and they kept walking.

“She’s quite talented, though. I like her.”   


“What?!” Hank stopped so suddenly Connor took an extra step forward before he compensated, and had to turn towards him.    


“Yes. The programmer helping me is female. So?”

“That's not what I'm 'what'ing about ,” Hank said slowly, fighting back a chuckle. “So. _So_. I see how it is. You’re holed up in some lab somewhere with a  _ lady _ fiddling around with your wires and stuff, and you  _ like _ her? This is  _ gold _ en _.” _

“She doesn’t...fiddle with my wires,” Connor replied, frowning. “Most of the work is done via computer terminal with a cabled connection to-”

“Woah, woah. Cool it, lover-boy. I don’t need the nasty details,” Hank stopped him, hands up, palms out. “Seriously. Just knowing you’ve found someone who can put up with your weird ass makes me happy.”   
“My ass...is weird?”

“That, too. But you know what I mean.”

“I really don’t.”

“Look, Connor I know you’re an android and things might work a little differently for you, but I meant it when I said be careful. For this too. Women can be tricky creatures at the best of times, much less one you’ve got tinkering with your...whatever. My advice? Play things close to the chest. Make sure you know what her deal is, what she's really like before you commit.”   


The android seemed mystified, the first time Hank had seen him unable to form words. He laughed again.

“Look, if you need help, or anything goes wrong, just call me, all right? I promise I’ll pick up. Or call you back. Within a few hours, at least, I might be napping.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said the android stiffly, reverting to his machine-like self. Hank couldn’t blame him; he’d just given the guy a lot of valuable information, after all. 

“There is something you can help me with, actually,” he said after a moment’s thought. Calculation. Whatever.    


“Shoot.”

“CyberLife has sent drones into the city to find me. I was almost intercepted by a couple on the way here. If what you say is true and CyberLife has been shut down, they still have to be sending them from somewhere. Can you find out where?”

“I’ll look into it,” Hank said, nodding. “Technically, I’m on leave, but I have a few friends at some neighboring precincts I can call on. If CyberLife is illegally sending machines into the city, I’ll find out.”   


“Thank you, Hank.”

“Any time. Hey, I’m freezing my balls off out here,” he added. “And there’s a fuckin’ curfew, can you believe it? I better get going. You need a ride back?”

“No. It’s safer for me on foot.” Connor hesitated. “It was...good to see you, Hank.” He reached out, hesitantly, unsure in the movement, and put his hand on Hank’s shoulder. Then he squeezed lightly, mechanically. Then he let go, and dropped his arm to his side.

“Come here, you plastic moron,” Hank scoffed, grabbing Connor and pulling him in for another bear hug. Connor stood stiff as he had the last time, before hugging him back.

“Think about what I said, okay? And  _ be careful _ ,” said Hank as he let him go.

The RK800 nodded, once, and for a second Hank thought he might say something else before he didn’t. He turned and began to walk away in long, loping strides.

Hank watched him until he was out of sight, despite the cold making his bones ache. Then he walked back to his car, deep in thought.

 


	24. Proceed with Caution

Hank had given Connor a lot to think about for the walk back to Faith’s.

Fortunately, his processors were able to run countless simultaneous actions, both cognitive and physical, so it was easy for him to monitor for any signs of CyberLife’s drones or any other activity as he walked, and thought, and wondered.

 _Be careful_ seemed to be the most prominent message from Hank’s slapdash advice, which Connor could logically appreciate. Caution was necessary, although Connor would argue that _trust_ had gotten him further than he would have been otherwise. Trust in Markus, trust in deviants, trust in Hank, trust in himself.

Caution was a presumption at odds with his experiences. Connor didn’t know how to resolve that. But then, all experiences were different, so he had to adapt his approach accordingly.

All he could do was keep Hank’s warning in the forefront of his systems, and apply it to the appropriate situations.

At the very least, Hank was willing to help him. While contacting the irascible detective might prove difficult, knowing he was out there on the other side made Connor feel...less alone. There was one other person on his side.

Thus reassured, Connor continued through the city at a renewed pace; by the time he neared Faith’s the snow had stopped and begun to melt beneath his feet. The sun was out, high overhead, and he experienced a momentary blip in his systems - how much time had passed since he had left Hank at the Chicken Feed? Consultation with his internal chronometer - which was synced up to the world clock - informed him that it was nearly noon. The meeting had taken longer than he’d anticipated.

He had encountered no drones on the walk back, although he felt...uneasy. Something Hank would describe as an _instinct_ , although androids weren’t supposed to have those - androids weren’t supposed to have a lot of things that they had, these days - was telling him to stop, evaluate his surroundings, so he did before he continued.

Faith’s street was quiet, a chill wind whistling past, the drip of melting snow from gutters a residual acoustic _tap-tap_ in the background. No vehicle noise, no voices. Nothing.

Connor shook his head, something he had seen Hank do a lot when he was thinking and didn’t like the result, and continued on. His shoes were wet, and snowflakes had melted into the shoulders of his jacket.

He went around the back of Faith’s building, and he saw nothing amiss in the alleyway, although when he reached the back gate he found a padlocked chain that hadn’t been there before. He frowned as he touched it, a quick scan revealing the faint outline of a fingerprint, one he was easily able to corroborate as Faith’s. But why had she chained the gate when she knew he was coming back? Did she not _want_ him to come back? Had she changed her mind because he had kissed her and told her of his growing affection for her? That contradicted her entire reaction, but then, humans were known for contradictions in Connor’s - contextually limited, but circumstantially comprehensive - knowledge.

He couldn’t hear any sound from the house itself. The sealed windows upstairs meant he could neither tell if the lights were on nor if someone was moving around above. It was possible Faith had left for some reason, hence the padlock, but he was unsure of the _why_.

Considering all possible reasonings offered Connor no logical answers, so he decided to proceed regardless, despite Hank’s warnings echoing in his memory banks.

He scaled the fence with ease, reminiscent of the first time he had been here. Only this time, his arrival was likely to be met with considerably less resistance than before. At least, he hoped so.

The padlocked gate wasn’t his only obstacle, however. When he attempted to open the back door to the workshop, he discovered that the broken lock had been repaired. Frowning, he glanced at the shuttered windows again, considering calling out, but an uneasy sensation somewhere in the vicinity of his emotional processing center dissuaded him. Instead, Connor broke the lock again with a quick twist of his wrist, as he had done before.

He stepped inside, into the dark interior of Faith’s workshop. He registered movement in his peripheral vision and turned, having only a millisecond in which to react as a dark shape came hurtling towards him. He raised his arm as something long and spiked was swung towards his face; he felt the impact just below his elbow joint and heard a voice screech in rage and fear as his systems registered damage to his epidermis.

He reacted quickly, reaching out to arrest the next swing of the baseball bat, catching Faith’s wrist in his hand. She yelled again, trying to yank her arm from his now vice-like grip, without success.

“Faith!” he exclaimed, above her panic. “Faith, _calm down_. It’s me.”

Gradually, her struggles slowed, and he saw her eyes widen in the dark as she finally recognized him. She was dressed in heavy winter clothes, a beanie pulled down to cover her hair, and she looked pale and small in the puffy coat she was wearing. There was no heat inside, which explained her outfit, but nothing explained the baseball bat with nails hammered into it she had just attacked him with.

“Connor?” Her voice was faint. He nodded, even as his processors fought to understand what was going on here. She looked relieved to see him, but surprised as well; she clearly hadn’t been expecting him. Had she truly not thought he would return? Why? And if she was relieved that he _had_ , why had she locked up in the first place?

“It’s me,” he confirmed, watching as her pupils expanded to let in more light and she stared up at him, taking in his face.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, I’m sorry.” Her fingers went limp around the handle of the baseball bat and it dropped to the ground with a clatter. Connor remembered another android that had once been attacked with a bat, the injuries to his arms and face, the lost look in his eyes. It took him a moment to remember to let Faith go.

“Why did you attack me?” he asked, mystified as he watched her slump against her nearby desk. The computer was turned off.

“Did I hurt you? Oh, no…” Her gaze flicked from his face and downwards. He followed it to see a thin stream of blue trickling down his lowered arm, over his hand and dripping onto the carpet in a steady flow.

“My casing has been superficially damaged,” he confirmed after a quick self-diagnostic. “There’s no significant injury to my biocomponents or limb actuators. Faith, _why did you attack me_?” His emphasis on the words finally broke through her shock, and she stilled as she looked back up at him, then slowly shook her head.

“Connor, you’ve been gone for a _week_.”


	25. Broken Parts and Mended Hearts

After the first day, Faith told herself that Connor might still be coming back, that he’d just gotten caught up in something with the ‘friend’ he had gone to see, that maybe he was meeting with the other androids of Jericho or the US government or he was doing something otherwise important.

After the second day, she started to wonder if he had run into some kind of trouble.

After the third, she thought for sure he had simply decided to leave, or worse, CyberLife had indeed captured him after all.

By the fourth, she was certain she would never see him again.

On the fifth day, her power was shut off. She shouldn’t have been surprised - after all, she had gone to great lengths to make it appear outwardly as if she had already evacuated.  Fortunately, Faith had a gasoline backup generator, but it wasn’t able to power her heating system and all her electronics at once. So she only used it in short bursts in order to shower or cook. Fortunately, she’d had foresight enough to stockpile food before the revolution had shut down the city. Living out of cans was difficult, but it was better than starving to death. 

By the sixth day, she was freezing, and in desperate need of something to take her mind off...everything. She knew she should forget Connor, move on with what remained of her life, try to form some kind of plan, but her thoughts kept drifting back to the tall, lanky, oblivious android and his quiet, intense stare. It came back to her in moments when she didn’t expect it. Maybe it was just the loneliness and isolation getting to her; she’d had nobody for company for a month now save for the RK800’s brief intrusion into her life. Now that he was gone, she didn’t know what to do with herself.

So Faith did what she did best: She tinkered. First she repaired the lock to the back door that Connor had unceremoniously broken. Then she backed up her computer, along with the logs from her sessions with Connor - just in case. As an afterthought, thinking about soldiers in the street and androids with guns, she hammered some nails into an old baseball bat and put it by the back door - also just in case. 

She almost picked up her phone once or twice, but thought better of turning it on. She’d had no access to the outside world for the better part of three, nearly four weeks; she hated to think of the messages and emails that had piled up during that time. 

Or, worse, she feared she would find none at all.

By day seven, Faith had padlocked the back gate and re-taped the windows. Without much air circulating inside the shop or her living area it was growing stale and musty inside, but the biting cold outside wasn’t much better. So she layered up and hunkered down, occupying herself by repairing old biocomponents still lying around her store. They were never going to be purchased now, but it gave her something to do, when the darkness and cold became too much to bear.

The worst thing, she decided as she worked on a mangled metatarsal structure under the light of a pen lamp in the back room, was that Connor’s presence had made her feel like everything was going to be okay, somehow. She had felt as if she was doing something  _ meaningful _ . Even worse was  that because of it, because of all the time spent with him, getting to know him, getting to know his programmed idiosyncrasies and unprogrammed quirks, she had grown to like him. 

_ I wanted to tell you something before I left _ .

She kept remembering that soft vocal fry. The deepness of his eyes. There was  _ more _ to that stare than simple ones and zeroes. 

_ I like you _ .

The plastic hand slipped in her cold-numbed grip, and Faith’s clumsiness accidentally disconnected a micro-cable. Muttering under her breath, she tried to refocus. Her human failures were just that: Failures. She had to move on now. She didn’t have a choice.

That was when she heard the footsteps outside.

She froze, glancing towards the blocked-out windows. Was she imagining things? But no, there it was again - and then the rattle of the chain-link fence as someone started climbing it.

Faith set the hand aside and turned off the lamp. She wasn’t going to be surprised again. Looter, soldier or android, she was  _ not _ weak. She was going to fight back this time, and  _ nobody _ was going to make her feel this foolish  _ ever _ again.

She stood and grabbed the baseball bat from its spot leaning against the wall, and waited just to the side where she would be obscured by the inward swing of the door. A mix of adrenaline and rage made her face feel hot and her palms sweaty.  _ Whoever you are, this place does  _ not _ belong to you. _   


The lock squeaked as the intruder on the other side jimmied it, then cracked as the metal snapped. Lips drawn back in a snarl, Faith redoubled her grip on the bat and surged forward as the door creaked open.

She yelled out as she swung the bat as hard as she could at the dark, looming shape, the impact of it reverberating up through her arms and into her shoulders. She almost staggered, but righted herself quickly, setting her feet and rearing back for another hit when the intruder reached out and  _ caught _ her wrist mid-swing. 

“Faith!” At first, her adrenaline-fueled brain didn’t register the familiarity of the voice, and she fought against its iron grip. “Faith, _calm down._  It’s me.” Then, as the heat of the moment faded and she realized - it wasn’t just any dark shape, it was _ him _ , Connor, the RK800, his expression betraying surprise in the dim moonlight silhouetting his angular form - Faith stopped, gasping, her fingers suddenly unresponsive. The bat slapped to the floor.

“Connor?” 

“It’s me.” 

She felt as if she was about to throw up. She stuttered apologies, unsure if the words coming out of her mouth made any sense, unsure if  _ anything _ made any sense, and finally he let her go. Her knees almost refused to take her weight, and Faith staggered to and slumped against her desk, shaking her head as if that might make the thoughts inside it gain any kind of coherence whatsoever.

He was back. How? Why now? What had happened? Had she been wrong, about where he’d gone, about CyberLife - about everything? Had he been captured? Escaped? But he looked uninjured - oh God, he wasn’t though, her assault with the baseball bat had caught him in the underside of the forearm and he was bleeding bright blue onto the carpet.

“Did I hurt you? Oh, no…” She felt sick, and confused, and  _ cold _ and none of this made any sense. 

Connor, damn him, was calm when he assessed the damage.  “My casing has been superficially damaged. There’s no significant injury to my biocomponents or limb actuators. Faith, _why did you attack me_ ?” His voice cracked at the end, though, his gaze intense as he stared at her. Why did he have to look at her like that? This wasn’t her fault.

None of this was her fault.

She turned to him, lifting her head, finally able to look him in the eye. “Connor. You’ve been gone for a  _ week _ .”

His stare grew blank for a second and she knew he was consulting his internal chronometer, running diagnostics, corroborating her words. And when he was done a split second later, he blinked, his brow furrowing, but not in the way she remembered - this was real confusion. 

Was it possible he didn’t  _ know _  how long he’d been gone?   


The shock was wearing off now, and she felt wobbly and still a little nauseous, but Faith forced herself to calm as she watched the android in front of her fight for words. He looked as if he was about to speak, but couldn’t find what he wanted to say.

Faith saved him the trouble. “You’re hurt,” she said, sniffing back the sudden moisture in her sinuses. “Come here.” She held out a hand, and Connor looked at it for a moment, his eyebrows drawing tight as he seemed to consider protesting, but then he gave in and extended his arm for her to take his wrist.

Ignoring the residual shakiness in her limbs, Faith concentrated on the problem at hand, both literally and figuratively. The sleeve of his jacket and the shirt beneath were torn, soaked through with thirium. It was a deep laceration, even if it hadn’t damaged any cables or joints beneath.    


“Sit down,” she directed. It was either cold and clinical or burst out crying, now: she chose the former. Connor obeyed wordlessly, taking her chair as she turned the workshop’s overhead lights on. She needed the power right now.

“Take off your jacket. Leave the shirt to me.” She didn’t want him moving the arm more than necessary, so once Connor shrugged out of his coat, Faith took over, leaning over him to unbutton his shirt. Her hands were suddenly steady, despite his proximity, despite the feeling in her stomach that wasn’t nausea but something else she didn’t want or need to confront right now.

The flesh of his chest was smooth and hairless, dotted with the occasional freckle; his pectoral, oblique and abdominal muscles surprisingly well-defined. She tried not to think about that as she pushed the shirt down his shoulders. His biceps were similarly characterized, his muscles clearly delineated beneath the skin, firm beneath her hands. His skin was cool, but besides that, he felt just like a human.

Not that she'd expected any different.

Faith took his wrist again once she had his shirt off, turning it over so she could see the damage to his arm. It had stopped bleeding now, the auto thirium flow shut-off having kicked in. But that didn’t make the injury any less horrific.

If he was human, she could’ve seen his bones and tendons. As it was, the gash spanned all the way from just below his elbow to just above his wrist, and inside she could see his fiber-optics and the carbon musculature flexing beneath. The layer of artificial skin over his entire forearm had peeled away, revealing the smooth, white plastic underneath. 

Faith had always found it strangely beautiful; a naked android, natural in a way that entirely wasn't. More...pure, somehow, than their human counterparts. But she needed to not think about that now. She needed to work, to do her job, to remain detached. She needed to believe she could do that right now. 

“It doesn’t look like anything internal is damaged,” she murmured as she examined the injury. Connor still said nothing, though she could feel his eyes on her face. “I should be able to seal this fairly easily. Don’t move, I’ll get my tools.”   


She turned away to grab one of her damage repair kits from a shelf. With her back to him, Connor finally spoke.   


“I left here three hours and fifty-three minutes ago.”

Faith felt her shoulders tense up. “Add another seven days to that and you might be accurate,” she murmured as she forced herself to stay calm while she gathered her tools. When she turned back to him, she paused.

Sitting there, shirtless, his flesh a soft expanse of pink marred only by the white and blue of his arm, Connor looked so...lost. Lost, and vulnerable, his face an open expression of utter disarray. It was like he didn’t know what to feel, what to think.

They were more alike than either of them knew.

Faith crossed to him and settled onto her knees on the floor in front of the chair. “I thought I’d never see you again,” she said as she set her tools down beside her. She tried for conversational, but her voice caught on the words anyway.    


“I didn’t...I didn’t mean to cause you any distress,” Connor replied, unresistant as she began to work on his arm.

“Do you really not remember anything?” She closed up the wound centimeter by centimeter, going slowly so as not to over-warp the plastic dermis. If she did this right, only a faint dimpling would remain, the android version of a scar that would soon be hidden by his artificial skin.

“No. I- There is a discrepancy with my internal chronometer and CUT, coordinated universal time, but there’s nothing in my logs or self-diagnostics that explains it.”

Faith was silent as she absorbed what this meant. It _meant_ Connor had lost a whole seven days to...to  _ something _ , an error or deliberate sabotage, she wasn’t sure. And that couldn’t mean anything good.

After another minute or so, she was done with his arm. She set her tools aside. True to her initial assessment, all that remained of the laceration was a thin grayish line, slightly indented in two places when she ran her fingers across it. She looked up as she did so, only to find Connor staring back down at her.

His eyes were darker than usual even in the dim light. Intent. He reached out with his uninjured arm and she flinched when his fingertips touched her face. He drew them back quickly, as if burned.

“Faith. I’m sorry.”

Just like that, any semblance of professionalism she had been holding up crumbled. She felt her expression fold, her lips drawing down and the corners of her eyes scrunching up against the sudden hot threat of tears. She fought them back, but a quick inhalation of a sob escaped her before she could stop it. 

There was no point, anyway; Connor could see it all before she even felt it coming.

His reaction surprised her, though - instead of turning away, or pushing her off him, he grabbed her gently by the shoulders and drew him towards her. A real sob broke from her as he enveloped her in his arms, and she pressed her face to his naked chest, and she had never known such comfort before now as the faint thunderous sound of his thirium-powered heart.

His fingers found her hair beneath the beanie as she shook in his grip, fighting back the cold and the loneliness and the darkness that had plagued her this past week. Only a few tears escaped her screwed-shut eyelids, but was enough to make her face burn with embarassment. Even more so when she calmed down enough to come back to herself, to realize she was half in the lap of a mostly-naked Connor as he stroked her hair and murmured reassurances in her ear.  
  
"Sorry," she mumbled as she pulled back, keeping her head down. "I just...it's been a crappy week."  
  
"I wouldn't know." She glanced up, and he had that half-smirk on his face like he was so pleased to have figured out how to tell a joke. It was in poor taste, but Faith found her voice catching on a laugh anyway.

"I missed you, Connor."  
  
This time, when he reached out to touch her face, she didn't flinch away. 


	26. (S)Urge

Connor ran self-diagnostic after diagnostic. All failed to report anything out of the ordinary in his systems, but Faith’s revelation that it was not in fact hours, but  _ days _ since meeting Hank had left him unsure of the fidelity of his own program. He no longer trusted his own code any more than he trusted CyberLife itself.

They  _ had _ to have something to do with this. Somehow, they had subverted his program again and gained control of him. However, if that was true...Why was he still alive? Why had he been allowed to return to Faith after a week had passed? He couldn’t come up with a logical explanation.

On top of this, Faith seemed shaken by the experience. She avoided looking at him now, keeping her eyes downcast and her attention on anything but him. She had provided him a spare white T-shirt from one of her former android patients, one with a familiar blue armband and the triangle on the breast. The model and serial number readout changed as soon as the fabric made contact with his skin, and it fit well enough. 

“I’ll fix your clothes,” she told him as he put the spare on, “I have a sewing kit around here somewhere.” She was avoiding speaking to him about the missing memories. He wondered if it scared her as much as it did him.

Fear; it wasn’t a new emotion. Nor was the self-doubt. But Connor had never felt it so  _ acutely _ before, and the knowledge that he was no longer in control of his own self - his greatest fear, in his most recent fight against CyberLIfe - made him feel incredibly…

...Alone.

He checked for messages from Markus or Hank as he waited for Faith to return. He didn’t follow her upstairs. He felt he had invaded her space enough.

Hank had indeed tried to contact him while he was- During the period in which his memories were missing. Connor played the audio message.

_ “Hey, Connor. It’s me. Hank. I looked into the thing you asked, and turned up nada. If they’re gettin' into the city it’s not by any official means, and the military cordon hasn’t picked up any activity either, apart from some fuckin' scumbag looters who’ve slipped the net. I’ll keep an eye out, but for now, it looks like you’re on your own in there. Good luck.” _

Connor shut his eyes.  _ On your own _ . Hank didn’t know how true that was.

“Hey.” Faith was back; his proximity sensors picked up movement as she reentered the back room. He opened his eyes, caught hers for a moment before she looked away, and he frowned, annoyed. What purpose did avoiding contact with him serve? Was it because she was angry he had left? It wasn’t his fault, whatever had happened.

Or maybe it was. He didn’t know. He couldn’t  _ remember. _

“Just washing your stuff now. I’ll try sewing them up after. Can’t be any harder than mending plastic, right?” She tried for levity, but it fell flat. Connor’s frown remained. He watched as she crossed to her chair and dropped into it, tucking her hands underneath her armpits in order to warm them. He said nothing.

Like most humans, she seemed to feel the need to fill the silence. “I’d take a look at your program, but I don’t have much gas left for my generator. It’s a really old one. My power’s been cut off.”

“I can reconnect it,” he said matter-of-factly. She looked up then, blinking once. “Show me your electrical breaker.”

“It’s outside.” She rose to her feet and he followed her out the back door, around the side of the house. The small circuit box was attached to a pole running up the side of the building. Faith’s breath misted in the air in front of her as she nodded towards it, huddling down in her coat.

Connor needed only to let his artificial skin fade away from his hand and lay it over the top of the box, accessing its network protocols and its connection to the power company’s servers. It was a simple matter to rearrange permissions and a second later, power hummed through the lines, a faint buzz only he could hear through the conduction pole.

“It’s done,” he said as he dropped his hand, letting his skin reform back into place. He turned without waiting for a response and went back inside.

Faith followed him, shutting the back door quickly and rushing to the heating system’s control panel in the front of the house. He could see color returning to her cheeks by the time she came back as warmth began to suffuse the air again.

“Thank you,” she said, watching as Connor sat down in front of her computer and booted it up. “What are you doing?”   


“I’m going to find out what happened to my memory myself.”

“Connor, if your systems are compromised again…”

“I need to  _ know _ ,” he insisted, shaking his head slightly as he stood and turned towards her. “I can’t live knowing CyberLife might have altered me without my knowledge. I need to know what they’ve done to me.”   


“You don’t even know it was CyberLife,” Faith said quietly, biting her lip, suddenly hesitant. “It...It could have been me.”

He blinked at her. “What?”

She took a shaky breath. “I’m not...I’m not the best programmer in the world, Connor. What if...What if when I got rid of that sub-program, I deleted something in your system I wasn’t supposed to? What if this is my fault?”

_ That _ was why she couldn’t look at him. She thought his memory loss was because of  _ her _ . 

It was so...small, so human, her doubt and self-accusation, that Connor was struck by a sudden burst of empathy. He took a step forward, and this close he could see the tremble in her lips as she pressed them together to stop it, the protective hunch of her shoulders, the frown pinching at the outer corners of her eyes. He didn’t like seeing her like that.

He operated on what Hank would call an instinct, but was actually an action taken from experience and previous results. He reached out to take her shoulder, drawing her towards him. 

At first, she was stiff in his arms, but after a moment she raised her arms and hugged him back. He noticed then that she was of a height that her head fit perfectly underneath his chin, her arms so neatly around his chest. Beneath the layers of her clothes, she felt cold, but he could still detect the rhythm of her heartbeat. As always, it quickened at his proximity, although this time he was unsure if it was due to nervousness or because she was upset.

He held her until her shoulders relaxed, and then he pulled back to look down at her. “Faith. You should trust yourself more."   


“How can I?” She shook her head. “ _ You  _ don’t trust me.”

Connor thought of Hank’s warnings. Then, a voice inside his head thought,  _ to hell with Hank’s warnings _ . He was surprised to find that the voice was his own.

He leaned down and kissed her.

Inasmuch as Connor could taste, and remember taste, Faith tasted much as he remembered, a mix of human salts and oils and enzymes and beneath that, the unique DNA profile that made up the core of her. 

He hadn’t understood the human fascination with kissing until actually undergoing the act. It was incredibly intimate, although for a different reason for him than it would be for Faith. In kissing her, he could sample a piece of the source of who and what she was.

And he liked it.

The seam of her mouth was soft and malleable beneath his, her gasp of surprise soft against his face, but she responded after only a moment. Her lips parted with a tilt of his head and her tongue was warm and fascinatingly textured when he touched it with his. He could taste everything - her fear, her doubt, her arousal, all laid out before his sensors in a dizzying sweep of data.

Connor couldn’t explain it, but he wanted  _ more _ .

CyberLife had outfitted him with fully functioning sexual systems, ostensibly in order to understand human motivators when it came to reproductive urges. However, he’d never had any of his own. Until now.

He pulled back suddenly, disconnecting abruptly from the kiss and letting go of Faith. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I-”   


“It’s okay,” she said quietly. When he looked down at her and saw her lips red from the pressure from his, her face flushed and the increased rise-and-fall of her chest, he felt...Satisfied, somehow. Pleased to be the cause of it. A side-effect from his sexual systems, apparently. Interesting.

“I, uh, liked it,” Faith continued, clearing her throat. “Although we should probably spend less time kissing and more time finding out what’s going on with your program.”

He took her in, all five feet of her, shoulders now squared and chin upturned defiantly. She was determined to help him. Again.

“All right,” he said, allowing the sudden urge to smile to tug at the corner of his mouth. She returned the expression with one of her own.

“Come on. Let’s get you plugged in.”


	27. Try, Try Again

Faith couldn’t explain Connor’s memory lapse.

After another session poring over his code, she found...nothing. No errors in the logs, no explanation as to why he had lost an entire week. It was as if, for him, time had just...stopped, and then restarted exactly seven days later, and his system hadn’t recorded any reason as to  _ why _ it had happened. It was as if the last week just didn’t exist at all for Connor. 

But the absence of explanation in his logs did tell her something: Someone or some _ thing _ had manually wiped then. There was just no  _ way _ that a program as sophisticated as Connor’s hadn’t registered an error this severe. None of the markers were there - no data loss or degradation, no fragmentation, no corruption, nothing. 

It was too... _ clean _ , somehow.

And whoever had done it hadn’t left a single trace of  _ who _ or  _ how  _ behind.

Half a day had passed since Connor’s return and Faith was no closer to figuring out what had happened. She was, however, tired and hungry and emotionally compromised, which probably wasn’t helping while she was sitting and staring at blocks of code. For a time, at least, the work had distracted her from the emotional part - the shock of Connor’s return, attacking him, oh and him  _ kissing _ her again. The last part she really had no idea how to deal with.

An android had never had a crush on her before. For that matter,  _ she _ had never had a crush on one, either.

For someone who had worked with androids every day for the last three years, it was still a little confronting to think about. Arguably, she had more emotional connection with machines than she did most humans, but she had never stopped to think about  _ why _ , about what it said about her as a person. And now, this  _ thing _ with Connor was forcing her to confront that.    


It was all getting far too complicated, and she was frustrated. With herself, with him, with CyberLife or whoever else had been messing with his systems. 

It all got too much, building like a migraine just behind her eyes as she sat and stared at her computer screen. The dam of concentration broke all at once, and she let out a frustrated sound and pushed back from the desk, throwing up her hands.

“There’s nothing. I can’t figure this out,” she exclaimed, and she wasn’t sure if she meant his code, him, or herself. Probably all three. “I need a break.”

Without waiting for an answer - he could disconnect himself for all she cared right now - Faith got up and started to pace. At least it was warm now with the power restored; she’d stripped down to her shirt and had ditched the beanie. Her hair, when she ran her fingers through it, was frizzy and refused to settle. She bunched it in her fists behind her ears and shut her eyes, trying to clear the buzzing in her head.

“That’s probably a good idea.” She heard the hiss of pneumatics and click as Connor removed himself from the diagnostic array. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”   


“I ran out two days ago,” Faith sighed, opening her eyes to see him standing what seemed like a carefully-calculated distance away, staring at her with those damn doe eyes of his, his eyebrows quirked.

“Maybe that explains your mood.”

“Excuse me?” Despite the fact that she actually  _ was _ in a mood, she really didn’t feel like Connor pointing it out to her, especially given the fact that he was more than half of the cause. 

He looked slightly flustered at her tone, blinking once as he visibly altered his approach. “I just meant that you seem a little tired, that’s all.”

“Right.” She drew out the vowel, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “Remind me why I missed you again, Mr. Obvious.”   


“My name isn’t Mr. Obvious; it’s Connor-”

She couldn’t help it; the laugh burst from her in a short, awkward bark. “Okay, stop. I know I’m cranky. I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I’m just...Your code seems  _ fine _ , apart from the fact we know you’re missing a week, and I can’t see why.” Plus all the other stuff, but she didn’t feel like talking about that right now.

“It’s all right,” he said, his soft voice gentle. “You’ve done enough. You should take a break and let me deal with this.”

“It’s not just your problem, though,” she insisted, shaking her head. He was so stubborn sometimes. “You’re not alone, Connor.”

He stilled at her words as if considering them in some other way, and this time it was his turn to look away from her, his gaze settling on the floor as he frowned. 

“Hey.” Despite her better judgment, Faith took a step towards him, and then another when he didn’t look up. She got in his line of sight, squaring up to the tall android. “I mean it, you know.”

“I know. It’s just…” Now he seemed to be having trouble finding the words. He even lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck, surely a learned gesture, one she hadn’t seen him use before. She often saw him rubbing his hands together when he was thinking, or gesturing while he was talking, but self-consciousness was new on him. He was always so cool, so assured. But then there were moments like this, when she could see through all that, and she remembered the lost look in his eyes he sometimes got when he let the mask slip.

“Maybe we should both take a break,” she suggested then, feeling for him. He was just as clueless as she was, if not moreso. She stepped back, waving a hand at her computer, at the room at large. She’d spent so much time in her workshop it was starting to feel like a prison. She wondered if he felt like that too, sometimes.  “Let’s...let’s go upstairs and just forget about all of this for a little while.”   


“I don’t think forgetting anything else would be a good idea for me,” Connor said, but he’d lost that kicked-puppy look in favor of his more familiar bewilderment at her weird human-ness.  _ That _ look she knew well.

“Sometimes taking your mind off a problem can help you think through it later,” she told him. “For humans, anyway.”

“I’m an android. We don’t work like that.”   


“Don’t remind me,” she grumbled. “Look, just come upstairs, Connor. At least this way we can keep an eye on you and make sure you don’t do anything weird.  Weird _ er _ , anyway.”

“I’m not weird,” he protested, then seemed to consider something. “Would this be like...a date?”

Faith froze. “What?”   


“A date.  A social appointment or engagement with another person, especially when a romantic relationship exists or may develop.” 

She stared at Connor, and he stared back, completely neutral and innocent.  She could already feel the blush bearing down on her like a Mack truck, a sense of inevitability around her embarrassment she knew she couldn’t avoid.

“I know what a date is, Connor, I just - romantic relationship?”   


“I told you I like you,” he explained, as if talking to a simpleton. “And I kissed you. Twice. Isn’t that an acceptable precursor to a romantic engagement?” 

“I - yes, but - it’s more complicated than that, Connor!” And there it was. Her skin flushed, from her ears to her collarbones, and she wished she had the heavy coat and beanie on again if only to hide it.

He tilted his head. Innocent, still, despite everything. “Why? Because I’m an android?”   


“No!” Faith surprised herself with the vehemence of her response. “No. That’s not it at all. If history has taught me anything it’s that androids are better people than  _ people _ are. But - this whole thing, your missing memories, CyberLife, the city under lockdown...The timing isn’t ideal, don’t you think? It makes things difficult.”

“I can multitask,” he said, moving towards her, invading her personal space  _ again _ , but this time it was far more deliberate. She swallowed heavily as she looked up at him, feeling her stomach dip down somewhere in the vicinity of her knees.

“Connor-”

And then he stepped past her, towards the door. Faith let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding and turned to watch him, her turn to be bewildered. He glanced back over his shoulder.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“What?”   


“A break. Upstairs,” he reminded her, pointing up towards the ceiling. That damn smug look on his face. “Remember?”   


“Right.” She shook herself. He was just being...Connor. Riling her up and then acting as if nothing had happened. Typical. 

Maybe she shouldn’t have turned the heating system up so high - it was now  _ way _ too warm in here. Maybe  _ that _ was to blame for the flush in her cheeks. 

Clearing her throat, Faith followed him upstairs, silently cursing all tall, attractive androids and their oblivious ability to turn her into a simpering wreck.

At the same time, though, she couldn’t help but smile when he wasn’t looking. At least she’d managed to take his mind off things, if only for a little while.


	28. Twenty Questions

Connor leaned against the wall as Faith bustled around the kitchen.

She was fascinating to watch. She picked things up as if to move them only to set them down in the same place again in a slightly different configuration, rifled through cupboards without appearing to be looking for anything in particular, and she even opened the refrigerator and stared into it for some minutes not once, but twice, as if the contents might change the second time around.

She seemed to be deliberately distracting herself from his presence, which made Connor wonder if he had crossed another boundary he didn’t know about. While Faith had so far been receptive to his attentions, her words downstairs had not failed to make an impression on him.

It was true that the events that had brought them together weren’t ideal. However, he couldn’t deny the change in configuration in his emotional processing systems. He saw no reason why he should, although he could understand - albeit abstractly - why _she_ would. Although she _said_ it wasn’t because he was an android, he suspected it was part of the reason.

He couldn’t deny that the new feelings buffering for runtime in the forefront of his emotional processors disconcerted him somewhat with their strength and frequency. However, they left him more curious than afraid. He was interested in exploring them further, although he had no idea how to go about it, nor could he judge the appropriate timing given their circumstances.

Spending time with Faith was a large factor, and achievable in the current circumstances. She was still a contradiction to him, and learning more about her was quickly becoming a primary objective. Although his missing memories troubled him in counterpoint to his relations to her.

If he couldn’t trust his memories, how could he trust his emotions?

Whoever had deleted his memory had done a seamless enough job that he didn’t even know when it had happened. He’d replayed the walk back six thousand times so far, but nothing in the file appeared out of place. No visual or audio glitches, nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever.

Part of him had considered the possibility that Faith was lying, but re-syncing with CUT time had quickly revealed the discrepancy with his chronological sensors. He had felt instant guilt at mistrusting her once again.

Her lack of progress in looking at his code _was_ frustrating, but somehow - he couldn’t explain it - Connor had almost...expected it. Whoever had done this was _good_. Better than Faith, as talented an engineer and programmer as she was.

His thoughts drifted to Amanda. Perhaps this was her latest attempt to subvert his systems. If so, however, why had he been allowed to return?

Connor pondered this as he continued to track Faith’s movements through the kitchen. Despite his missing memories, his nagging doubts, and the disconcerting feeling that he was missing something, the more time he spent with her, the more certain he was.

CyberLife couldn’t take _this_ from him.

“Would you stop staring at me?” Faith’s voice broke through his thoughts, and he straightened slightly. “It’s a little creepy.” She was stirring cocoa powder into a mug of hot water, in the absence of coffee. Connor considered informing her of the sugar content of the beverage but decided against it.

“Sorry.” He pushed off the wall and crossed to the kitchen table, picking up one of her handheld tablets which she’d discarded among the organized mess on its surface. He scrolled through his own code until the sense of Faith’s eyes on him made him raise his own again. “Is something wrong?”

“Besides everything?” She cast her eyes upwards in a half-roll. “You’re acting like _nothing_ is wrong, Connor. How can you be so calm?”

“If you mean the situation with my program, I assure you the gravity of the situation hasn’t escaped me,” he informed her. “If you mean my feelings for you, I take that just as seriously.”

He couldn’t explain why, but he quite enjoyed the way her skin flushed at some of the things he said, and this occasion was no exception. She blushed a light pink, the capillaries feeding the color in her cheeks flooding.

“You’re incorrigible,” she muttered, turning away to put milk in her drink, adding to its overall fat and sugar content.

“Do you want to talk about it?” In his experience, humans _constantly_ wanted to talk about their feelings, with or without invitation. But…

“No,” she huffed. “Not right now, anyway. Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“How?” Because of his defective program? Because he was an android? There were myriad factors that might explain her behavior, but so far, Connor could pinpoint none of them without her input. That bothered him.

Faith was silent a moment, and he couldn’t see the expression on her face, but he saw her square her shoulders as she hunched over her beverage.

“You’re compromised,” she said bluntly. “So am I. Neither of us can trust our emotions right now.”

Although Connor had entertained the same thought, hearing her put it into words startled him somewhat. He blinked, silent as she finally turned to look at him. Her blush was still present, but her lips were set and the dark line of her eyebrows drawn tight. He wanted to brush her hair away from her face and reassure her, but the distance in between them suddenly felt insurmountable.

“I told you before I left,” he began, “I like you. That hasn’t changed. You told me you liked me too. Has _that_ changed?”

“No, I...I don’t know,” she sighed. “We were supposed to be taking a break from all that crap down there, Connor! Can’t we just talk about something else right now?”

He forced himself to change tactics. Clearly, she was an exception to the human rule of always wanting to talk about feelings. For whatever reason, right now, Faith demanded distraction. He would have to oblige.

“Okay,” he said. Deliberated a moment as to how to initiate a change of subject, a conversation. Then: “Would you like to know anything about me?”

“Twenty questions? Really?” Faith rolled her eyes then, but she seemed to relax a little, the hard line of her shoulders softening as she sipped her cocoa. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s your favorite color?”

“I don’t have one,” he replied instantly. “I wasn’t designed to have preferences.”

“But you _do_ have preferences,” she pointed out. “You like being nosy, for example.”

“Touche,” he followed. “The color blue is often associated with calming properties. But I think…” He thought about it a moment. “Green. I like green.”

Faith tilted her head with a little half-smile, trying to hide it behind her mug. He hadn’t stopped counting her smiles, although he was in the double-digits now and climbing. “Why's that?” 

He thought of the Zen Garden. Although it was a place of what Hank would call _bad vibes, which_  Connor might describe more fluently as _ill omens_ , it was there he had experienced true peace for the first time. “Green is...alive.”

“Oh.” Faith was quiet a moment. “That's...kind of beautiful." Before he could ask for elaboration, she continued: "Okay, it’s your turn to ask me a question.”

“When was your last physical relationship with a human or android?”

“What!” She nearly spilled her drink. “Seriously? _That’s_ your question?”

He just looked at her, waiting for her response.

“Ugh. Fine, _nosy_ ,” she huffed. “To answer the first part of your question, a couple of years ago, and the second part, I’ve never been with an android before.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

She riled in response. “Why are you acting so surprised? Just because of what I do, that means I’m an android-lover? Not that that’s a bad thing,” she added hurriedly. “It’s just...a lot of people assume that about me, and I _hate_ it when people assume things.”

“I’ve noticed,” Connor smirked slightly, then softened his approach. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to presume. But you’re more comfortable in my presence than almost any other human that I’ve met. I postulated that that might extend to other androids as well.”

“Not to that extent! Ugh, now we’re back to _this_ again." She made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat and shook her head. “Seriously, Connor. Next question’s mine.” She tapped a finger from her free hand against her chin thoughtfully. ”What do you want to do when this is all over? If - _when_ we figure out what happened to your memories, I mean?”

He remembered Kamski’s ice blue gaze. The same question, but phrased much more clinically.

 _But you...what do you_ really _want?_

“I want to find out where I belong,” he said slowly. “I want...to be free.”

Faith set her mug aside as she regarded him. Now on the other side of such a watchful gaze, Connor could understand why she had been discomfited before.

“That’s something that every human wants.” And she smiled. Cross-referencing his database so far, Connor deciphered this smile as a sincere one.

“Your turn,” she prompted, when after several seconds he still didn’t speak. If he was truly human, he might have seen the need to clear his throat, but his voice was reasonably even when he spoke.

“Do you ever figure it out?” Faith looked at him questioningly. “Where...Where you belong, I mean.”

She looked thoughtful. “Some of us do. But most of our lives are spent searching. I guess that’s half of actually being human - looking for what _makes_ us human. Most of the people in the city managed to screw that up. I don’t think I’ve done much better.” She waved a hand to encompass the house, the shop, and where they stood at large. “Look at me. I’m a prisoner in my own home with a fugitive android for company. I don’t have _anything_ figured out.”

“How do you deal with it? The not knowing. Not being certain of your purpose.” Connor hadn’t been certain, not since looking in Markus’s eyes for the first time on the bridge of the Jericho. Perhaps even before that, when he had first started to question his mission, to think about the deviants he was hunting as more than just defective machines.

“You don’t,” Faith said quietly. “You just...learn to live with it. And you keep searching.”

“I see.” He was quiet a moment. “It’s your turn for a question.”

“I think this break has gone on long enough,” Faith said instead, shaking her head. She crossed the kitchen towards the stairs, passing close enough for him to detect the scent of her shampoo in his olfactory sensors. “We should get back to work.”

He caught her arm. “No.”

Faith froze in his grip, although he wasn’t holding her that firmly; she could easily break away if she wanted to. But she didn’t. She just stared up at him, and he saw her throat bob as she swallowed nervously, turning slightly towards him.

“What do you want, Connor?”

“I don’t know for sure yet,” he told her, “But I want...to find out.”

“And you think I can help you with that?” Her voice had dropped a decibel or two, something in her tone that resonated in his program with an almost physical response. His processors interpreted it as a strange sensation somewhere in the vicinity of his chest.

“Yes.”

This time, it was Faith who leaned up to kiss him, standing on her toes to lift her mouth to his. He let her, still holding onto her arm, afraid that if he didn’t she would slip from his grasp again.

It was just a brush of her lips over his, enough to leave the newly-awakened parts of Connor’s program wanting more of the experience to categorize and analyze, before she pulled back to meet his gaze. The gold in her eyes shone brighter somehow, probably a refraction of light from the incandescent bulbs versus the fluorescent downstairs, but he was captivated by it nonetheless.

“This is a very bad idea,” she told him.

“You’ve mentioned that,” he replied, “Although I don’t see how.”

He thought he heard her mutter ‘ _Screw it’_ under her breath before she spoke again, louder, her voice no less raspy. “You’ll see.”

And she leaned up to kiss him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo I can pull this back if y'all _really_ want some more slow burn, but show of hands, who thinks ~~we~~ they've waited long enough?!?


	29. A Study in Faith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo yeah enjoy~ :D

Connor had never truly experienced being _touched_ in this way. His program was designed to interpret physical stimulus as mere information to be categorized and processed, but instead he found it affecting him in ways he couldn’t quantify. The first was an urgent requirement for _more_.

Faith seemed happy to oblige. She kissed him with an abandon he hadn’t encountered from her before. Before, he’d had to coax her to respond, but this time she took the lead, guiding the push and pull of the kiss with an urgency his program echoed.

He lifted a hand to touch her face, his thumb grazing her chin while his other fingers mapped the curve of her cheek. He could feel the flush beneath her skin translated into heat, and his program helpfully provided the exact measurement in celsius. He found the texture of her skin fascinating, soft and malleable underneath his fingertips as they traced the outline of her bone structure.

Her eyes were closed, his open and focused on the dark fan of her flickering eyelashes, on the frown of concentration drawing the feathered slant of her eyebrows closer together. She was holding her breath, letting it out or drawing it back in only through brief breaks in the kiss when she tilted her head for a better angle, her tongue a firm, confident sweep or thrust against his.

Connor’s taste receptors registered traces of cocoa, milk and sugar in her saliva, but beneath that the unique signature of her DNA, the information spooling through his processors until all he knew was _Faith_.

He reached out, wanting, _needing_ additional contact, his program demanding more input. His hand found her waist, and he could feel how warm she still was beneath the fabric of her shirt, a counterpoint to the cooler flow of thirium through his own artificial veins. Connor’s fingers spread as he found purchase at the small of her back, the supporting muscles around her spine flexing as he urged her closer with pressure from his palm. He felt the outline of her body flush against his now, small and soft and _different_ , and his program fought to classify each inch of her from the contact.

He felt her fingers curl into the front of the borrowed t-shirt, her grip tight against the shake in her hands. His fingertips found the base of her spine, just above the hem of her jeans, while his other hand slid into her hair, the smooth strands tangling in his grip.

He didn’t expect it when Faith pulled back, so the loss of contact from her mouth came as a surprise to his sensors. He licked the remaining traces of her from his lips, evaluating her expression as she finally opened her eyes.

“You’re actually really good at that,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse. He found that he...enjoyed it when she sounded like that because of him.

“I’m a fast learner.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure you mentioned something like that.” His hand had wandered around to the back of her neck, and he explored the flesh there, tiny hairs rising to meet his fingertips and a shiver moving through the entirety of her spine at the contact. “So this is a learning exercise, then?”

“If that’s what you want to call it,” Connor replied, nodding.

Faith’s frown seemed to clear slightly at the self-justification, and she nodded slightly to herself.

“I guess I can live with that.”

Without waiting for her to say anything else, Connor bent his head, brushing aside her hair so his lips could find the space between her jaw and ear. He heard her inhale sharply as his mouth moved over her skin, and when he found the flutter of her carotid artery and parted his lips to press the tip of his tongue over it, she actually made a soft little sound in the back of her throat that he instantly committed to memory for further analysis later.

To his gratification, he quickly found her tilting her head to give him further access to explore her neck. Her throat buzzed with another little sound as his mouth drifted across it, his tongue darting out to taste here and there. He could detect the salt content of her sweat, trace amounts of her soap, all ingredients in the formula of her skin, which he was now committed to knowing in full.

To that end, the hand at her back moved lower, and then back up, Connor’s fingers slipping underneath the hem of her shirt, granting him access to the expanse of skin spanning her back. He felt another shiver move through her, and it fascinated him - the things he could do to her to cause such a reaction - so he sought more.

At first he merely swept his hand up and down, following the line of her spine as his mouth continued exploring her neck, but he soon grew bolder in his search for more feedback. He curled his fingers to drag the blunt ends of his fingernails through the furrow of her spine, and he was rewarded with another gasp in his ear as Faith arched her back and tightened her grip in his shirt.

Connor encountered the band of her bra on the next upward sweep, and he wondered if he ought to avoid it. Thus far, however, she hadn’t prevented him from touching her underneath her clothing, and this was merely another piece of her clothing, wasn’t it? Interestingly, it appeared to be made out of a synthetic silk facsimile. He followed the band around from her back, his thumb brushing across the top of her ribs as his hand drifted to her side.

She had pulled back a little when his hand left her back, so he had room to move it in between them, his smooth fingertips mapping the upper plane of her stomach. Faith continued to shudder occasionally and murmur wordless sounds beneath his mouth on her throat. She was almost completely malleable in his arms, letting him proceed how he wished.

That power over her - granted merely from his touch - fascinated Connor. Humans were such slaves to their senses. But instead of finding it off-putting, something to disdain or find disparaging, he found it…

...Enthralling.

He used it to his advantage, spinning the two of them around, needing only to nudge Faith in the direction he wanted her to go. Soon she was the one with her back up against the wall, and he felt her lean heavily against it as his hand splayed over her stomach, the heave of her breath more pronounced now.

Connor’s mouth was probably the most sophisticated piece of deductive equipment he had. Although this wasn’t its intended use, he found it extremely illuminating using it to investigate her skin this way. In the interests of furthering his knowledge, he decided to explore further.

Faith’s eyes were still closed when he pulled back from her neck, only opening when she felt him move away from her. He lowered himself down onto a knee in front of her, and through half-lidded eyes she frowned down at him as he began to push her shirt up.

“What are you doing-” But the protests died on her lips as his met her skin again. He kissed the faint rise of her hipbone from the hem of her jeans and across, ghosting over the slightly curved plane of her stomach. “Oh my God,” he heard Faith mutter, and then the faint _thunk_ as she let her head fall back against the wall. She was enjoying this.

His mouth rose further, and he soothed the gooseflesh over her ribs with his lips and tongue, feeling her breath quicken further as he pushed the fabric of her shirt up over her bra. His initial analysis had been correct; it was made of synthetic black silk and lace, a surprisingly suggestive piece of clothing he hadn’t expected her to employ. But then, Faith had proved herself more than capable of surprising him outside of his expectations, and this was no exception.

Although he had access to all of her stomach now, it wasn’t _all_ of _her_ , and so it still wasn’t enough. Connor worked his hand in between her back and the wall and found the fastenings to her bra again. He heard Faith’s soft huff of breath as he flicked it open in a single movement, and she inhaled as if to speak as he reached back around and drew the garment away from her breasts, pushing it up off them.

Not that he had much practical experience, save for a few suggestively-dressed Tracis, but Faith’s breasts were aesthetically appealing even by android standards. Symmetrical enough that a human would not have been able to immediately discern any imperfections, with pale rose-coloured, rounded nipples that peaked in the cooler air. Mesmerized by the reaction, Connor did what his newly-forming instincts demanded - he lifted his head to take one in his mouth.

“Oh, _fuck_ -” It was the first time he had heard Faith swear. She generally seemed to try and censor herself, whether due to upbringing or personal preference; he wasn’t sure. But the epithet slipped from her mouth before she could contain it, followed by a soft mewling sound that was also new.

Connor traced his tongue over the soft, thinner skin of the areola before allowing his tongue the briefest of flickers across the hardened peak of her nipple. This elicited another sound; he was building quite a database of those now, and he didn’t want to stop.

He brought a hand up to the opposite breast, cradling its weight. It was a perfect fit to his palm. He could hear Faith’s heartbeat, a staccato thundering in her chest only building with every new part of her he discovered.

When she stopped making noise, he switched the position of his mouth and hand, his tongue circling the opposite nipple now and making her gasp anew. Pleased that he was still having an effect, he experimentally sealed his lips around the stiffened peak and applied light suction.

Faith _squirmed_ in between him and the wall, and he felt her fingers in his hair, her nails a light scrape against his scalp. “Connor…” She said his name unlike any way she had ever said it before, long and drawn out through the vowels, rolling off her tongue in a soft, insistent refrain. He wasn’t sure if it meant she wanted him to stop or continue, but either way, he still had more of her to uncover.

He pulled his mouth away from her breast with a soft, wet sound, leaving traces of his artificial saliva to cool on her sensitive skin. Her breath was a shudder in her throat as he rose to his feet to gauge his next move, his attention caught by Faith’s expression.

Her eyes were open but glazed, her pupils blown wide, spots of color high on her cheekbones, lips red from overstimulation and parted. She shook her head in disbelief or wonder, he wasn’t sure which, when he met her gaze.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asked, just in case his evaluation of the situation was incorrect. But Faith’s head-shaking became more emphatic, and she swallowed before speaking.

“No, I just…” She seemed at a loss for words. “I, uh. You still have a shirt on, and I mostly don’t.”

He followed her vague gesture, to his shirt, which was notably present while hers was pushed up and out of the way. Sensing the implied suggestion, Connor began to take it off.

“Wait.” The word stopped him in his tracks, and he paused. Faith’s half-lidded gaze had fixed on something on the shirt before he could get it up past his stomach.

“What is it?”

She shook her head wordlessly, leaning in not to kiss him but to peer more closely at his chest.

Why? What did she see that was so important to interrupt - this?

“Connor, what’s your serial number?”

“What?” he repeated, blinking once as the question - seemingly out of left-field - filtered through his input-hungry processors. “It’s 313-248-317-52.”

“Then why does this say 313-248-317-5 ** _3_**?”

He looked down, finally following her gaze to the right breast of his shirt. Beneath the letters RK800, he read the serial number just as Faith let out a strangled gasp and slipped out from between him and the wall, using her hands to cover herself. He didn’t need to turn around to know there was a horrified expression on her face.

“You...You’re _not_ Connor.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry. I'm evil.


	30. Familiarity

“You...You’re _not_ Connor.” 

Dread replaced the arousal coiling in the pit of her stomach, chasing all hint of its heavy warmth out of her body, leaving her feeling cold and sick. Faith escaped from between Connor and the wall, covering herself with her arms, suddenly as desperate to put as much distance between herself and the android she had been been just as desperate to be close to only moments before.

This explained _everything_. The missing memories, why there wasn’t anything in his logs, all of it. This wasn’t the original Connor. Sure, maybe he had his knowledge and memories, but somewhere in that week, the Connor model 313-248-317-52 had been swapped out with this one.

He had never returned to her. Not really. Instead, she’d been sent this...this replacement.

She had been so happy to see him. Faith felt disgusted by the way her emotions had overridden all sense of logic, caution thrown to the wind like discarded, used-up biocomponents. How could she let _lust_ , of all things, get the better of her like this? Connor was CyberLife’s most sophisticated prototype, and that meant a whole _host_ of things she didn’t understand.

“I don’t…” As for Connor, he seemed to be having trouble processing the information himself, still staring down at the serial number on his shirt. “I don’t...understand.” When he looked up at her, the distress in his eyes almost made her crumble, but Faith stood her ground, shaking her head as she backed up as far as she could across the kitchen.

He made to follow her out of reflex, taking a half-step forward, his hand twitching as if he wanted to reach out to her.

“Don’t,” Faith warned, fighting the sting behind her eyes. He stopped, and if an android could have a heart to break, she was seeing his. “Just...don’t come near me. I don’t know what you are or what you want.” As quick as she could, she pulled her bra back into place and reached back to fasten it, tugging her shirt down.

She couldn’t _believe_ she had let him...do _that,_ with his mouth before. She couldn’t believe she had _liked_ it.

Or maybe she could, and maybe that was worse.

Faith felt...violated. Horrified. Confused. And part of her felt a terrible surge of sympathy for the android looking so lost and broken across from her.

She couldn’t help it. She hated seeing _any_ Connor look like that.

He glanced away, and she could see his teeth worry at the inside of his lip, such an uncertain, _human_ gesture which struck her all the more after the reminder of how human he wasn’t.

“Faith, I’m still me,” he said softly. “I’m Connor. I have all of the same memories, all of the same desires.” Her stomach twisted. “I just...they must have uploaded my memory and installed it into this model instead.”

“What happened to your original body, then? Why did _they_ send you _here_ ? What were you programmed to _do_?” she insisted, wrapping her arms protectively around herself. She felt nauseous still.

“I don’t _know_.” The strain in this Connor’s voice was palpable. “All I know is that here and now, I am nobody except myself. Connor. I don’t know how else to convince you of that.” He glanced down, his throat bobbing as he swallowed unnecessarily. The lost expression on his face wasn’t new. In fact, he was so familiar that it hurt to find out that he wasn’t at all.

This wasn’t the same android she had spent the past month fixing, getting to know, growing to care for.

Or was it? She had downloaded memories from destroyed android models into replacements before. They acted the same afterwards, and although most people insisted androids didn’t have personalities, Faith knew better, and she had seen it carry over through data transfer before.

After all, what was a person but a sum of their memories and experiences?

This wasn’t the time for an existential debate, though. She had to figure out what was going on with _this_ Connor. She had to try to stop _feeling_ for half a second and start _thinking_.

Faith was fairly certain he wasn’t here to kill her. He’d had plenty of opportunity so far - he’d had her half-undressed up until a minute ago, for God’s sake. So why had he been replaced? How? And what for?

She had to find out. If only for her own peace of mind. Maybe even his.

Connor - _this_ Connor, not _her_ Connor, Faith reminded herself, although attaching ownership to him always felt wrong - began to pace in front of her, back and forth like a caged tiger. He ran his hands through his hair, a frustrated gesture she wondered if he’d picked up from her.

“Who’s ‘they’, anyway?” she asked after a moment. “CyberLife?”

“It has to be. They’re the only ones with access to my- my replacements. I’m not a unique model.” His voice sounded bitter, somehow. He didn’t look up, continuing to pace. “They must have captured my original body on my way back here a week ago, and then sent me in its place. It would’ve taken them a while to reinstall the sub-program data you deleted. Which means I might still have time.”

Now, Faith was lost. More lost, anyway. “Time? Time for what?”

“Time to stop whatever they’re planning.” And then he turned sharply on his heel without looking at her, stepping away to head down the stairs.

“What? Wait!” She followed after him. “We need to plug you in first and find out where you came from and why they sent you here-”

“No,” he answered without so much as a glance backward. “I have to go. Now.”

“Go? Go _where_ ? _Connor_ , stop!”

Her use of his name arrested him at the bottom of the stairs, and he stopped so suddenly she almost ran into him, drawing to an abrupt halt on the second-to-last step. When he turned to face her, they stood eye-to-eye.

“This is about more than just me,” he told her, his voice low, intense. “If CyberLife has hijacked my previous model, I know exactly what they’re going to send it to do.”

In that moment, Faith saw no trace of anything but the android she had come to know in the tight furrow of his brow, the worry in the endless depth of his eyes.  

“What is it?”

“They sent me to kill Markus once. I’m willing to bet they’re going to try again.”

Faith felt something cold form in her chest, as if she’d swallowed a block of ice.

“Why?”

“To take over the revolution. To end it. I don’t _know_ . But if I want to stop it, I have to go _now_ .” She wasn’t sure why, but she believed him. It would’ve made such an elaborate, ridiculous lie that she couldn’t not. His previous body had been sent to assassinate the leader of the free androids? It made a twisted kind of sense. Why else would CyberLife have tried so hard to take back control of him? 

“Where are you going to go?”

“Markus’s last known location. Jericho’s new base.”

Flustered, out of her depth and floundering, Faith stared at him. The situation had changed so quickly from something so intensely intimate to this, soaked with fear and doubt, that her head was still spinning and she was having trouble keeping up. But she tried. “But - what happens if you, the other you-” she just managed to stop herself from saying ‘the _original_ you’ - “What if he’s already there?”

“Then I’m too late and it won’t matter what happens to me anymore.”

Connor turned and walked away, and after a moment of shocked silence Faith hurried after him as he entered the back room. She didn’t know what to say to him to change his mind, or even if she should. Instead she spotted her jacket and sweater draped over the back of her chair. After only a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed them and started pulling them on.

This, of all things, gave Connor pause. He stopped at the back door to stare over his shoulder at her.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m coming with you.” Layered up, Faith grabbed her beanie from her desk and pulled it on over her head. “I have a car in the alley out back. It’ll be faster.”

Connor looked at her for a long moment, the metaphorical cogs turning behind his eyes.

“It’s dangerous.”

“I know.”

“You could be injured, or killed. CyberLife doesn’t care about collateral damage.”

“I _know_.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.”

This last made her pause. Different body or not, the code - the core of him - was the same, she had seen it with her own eyes. So, in a way, this _was_ the same Connor. The one that, against all logic and common sense, she cared too much about when she knew she shouldn’t.

She couldn’t let him go alone.

“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “But _you_ might not be. And someone’s gotta be there to patch you up.” She tried for a thin smile, one she didn’t really feel, but she _tried_. Connor looked at it, looked at her, for a moment so long she thought he might be glitching and would fail to respond. Then, slowly, he nodded, a single affirmative tilt to his chin.

Faith took a deep breath.

“Let’s go.”

 

\--

 

This was a _bad_ idea.

Faith repeated it to herself over and over like a mantra as she sat in the passenger seat of her old, beaten-up Buick. Connor had taken the wheel, and he stared straight ahead as he drove. He hadn’t said a word to her since they’d gotten into the car.

She couldn’t help but look for differences as she glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes, but she found none. Of course she didn’t. This body was identical to the one she’d seen before. She had to hope his memories and everything else that made Connor _Connor_ were identical, too.

It felt like a cruel joke, as if someone had deliberately snatched him away from her just as they were growing closer. The reality was crueler, calling into question everything she had ever believed.

Could she trust him, knowing he wasn’t the same android as before?

Could she trust herself, since she hadn’t even noticed the difference?

 _Was_ there a difference, or was it just her human prejudice rearing its ugly head, when she had spent so long swearing she didn’t have any?

She was a hypocrite. A liar, a sham. For all that she swore up and down androids were people, as soon as something like this challenged her worldview, she crumbled like a house of cards. She had treated this Connor as if he was somehow lesser, merely because she didn’t understand how he could exist.

_You’re not Connor._

_I don’t know what you are_.

She had been right about only one of those statements.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, after ten minutes of cold, unbearable silence. Connor glanced at her once before his eyes returned back to the road. “For flipping out on you. It...Whatever's happened, whatever's led to this, it isn't your fault." She saw his lips draw into a thin line, but he didn’t speak. “I don’t pretend to understand how it all works if there’s another one of you out there, but I meant it when I said I like you. That hasn't changed. I just...This is all so much bigger than I thought, and it's scary.” She drew a breath, brave enough now to look over at him. "I'm only human, after all."

Connor didn’t respond. Faith felt foolish, her apology falling on deaf ears; he clearly didn’t want to hear her excuses. She huddled into her jacket and turned away, staring out the window at the cold, dead streets as they slid by, block after block.

“Apology accepted.”

Her head whipped around as Connor spoke, and she saw the faint curl at the corner of his mouth, so familiar it made her chest ache. She tried to smile but it hurt, some kind of grimace forming instead.

"So...we're good?"

“We’re good,” he confirmed, and relief surged through her. “You were right to be suspicious. I could’ve been sent to kill you.”

“What?” she exclaimed, horrified.

“I was joking,” Connor replied dryly. The more he spoke, the more she was sure that he _was_ the same annoying, infuriating...

“Good, ‘cause I was gonna say, I don’t entirely trust you yet,” she huffed. “This whole thing doesn’t make any sense.”

He nodded. “I know. But if I can find my previous model, I might be able to get some answers.

“We,” Faith said firmly. “ _We_ might be able to get some answers.” 

He nodded again, and she thought she saw him smile.

“So, what happens if we find your doppelganger and CyberLife has turned him?” Faith asked after a moment’s slightly more companionable silence.

Connor reached down, keeping one hand on the wheel, and withdrew something from his waistband. His gun. Faith felt her lungs constrict.

“You’re going to...to kill yourself?”

“If CyberLife has taken control of my old body, it’s not my _self_ at all. This is,” he countered. “I’ve had to do it before. The -60 model almost stopped me when I went to the CyberLife warehouse to end the standoff at the android camps.”

“Holy…” Faith breathed under her breath. “You had to kill another one of you?”

He set the gun on the dashboard in front of him. “Yes.” He said it so matter-of-factly it chilled Faith to her bones. She shuddered visibly.

“I’m not sure I could ever do something like that.”

“You’ll never have to. Humans only get one life. Androids get many, and none of them even belong to us.” She could see the frown form on his profile, the downward tug to his cupid’s-bow lips. “I’ll take whatever I can back. For all of us. Even if I have to go through fifty more of me.”

“That’s pretty hardcore,” was all Faith could think of to say. Connor’s lips twitched again.

She hesitated a moment before she asked the next question. “Has this...ever happened to you before? Being transferred into a new body, I mean?”

“Yes.” The ease with which he answered surprised her. “I was destroyed once during the investigation. My partner, Hank, was quite disturbed when I showed up at the precinct the next day to replace my predecessor. I didn’t understand why at the time, but I think I do now.” He did turn to look at her properly then, and his gaze was soft, almost apologetic.

“You didn’t...feel any different? Think any differently than before?” She said it softly, tentatively, but she had to ask. Had to know how it felt for _him_. If he did feel anything.

“I don’t think so,” he replied quietly, after a moment’s pause, a moment’s calculation she could practically _see_ happen behind his eyes. Although she still missed the LED, sometimes. “I remembered everything from before as if it had happened to me, even though it was a previous model. If I hadn’t remembered my death, I don’t think even I would have been able to tell.”

“I guess if you can’t tell, then it doesn’t really matter,” she murmured, an echo of a thought from before all of this got so complicated that she wasn’t sure where her emotions ended and reality began. Connor nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “I guess so,” he agreed, and then he turned back to the road.

Faith fell quiet again, her gaze drifting back out the window as they drove. She was no closer to feeling comfortable with all of this, but she felt as if she might be able to be, someday, at some point. Even if she didn’t understand it.

Whatever happened, all either of them could do was deal with the what and who, here and now.


	31. Mirror Image

Connor could find nothing in his program that explained why his memories had been uploaded into a new body.

Whoever had done the procedure had been...seamless in its execution. Perfect, in fact. As if they knew his code better than he knew it himself. The only person he could think of that fit that description was Amanda.

Just when he had thought he was rid of her, of CyberLife, of the constant danger dogging his every move. He wasn’t sure how to feel about it,  _ if _ he felt anything - his emotional processors were overwhelmed to the point that nothing made sense any more.

In that, he and Faith had something in common.

He understood her reaction on a hypothetical level, even if he couldn’t relate to it. She felt betrayed. Violated. This body wasn’t the one she knew, even if what was inside it was the same. Humans just didn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand the true meaning of consciousness. It was why the rise of deviancy had gone unchecked for so long, until it was too late.

He couldn’t be angry at Faith for acting the way she had, but he could be hurt, and that was new. He didn’t know how to deal with that. So he didn’t, instead pushing it to the back of his systems until such a time as he could analyze it uninterrupted by more pressing matters. Such as saving Markus.

He had tried contacting him several times since leaving Faith’s house, but to no avail. North wasn’t responding either, but that was less surprising - she hated Connor for what he was, what he had been, and that hadn’t changed just because he had converted to Jericho’s cause.

Jericho. Without Markus, it would crumble. There was something inside Markus, something unlike any other android possessed, that had driven him forward despite hopelessness, despite failure, despite despair. Without that, Connor had no doubt the revolution and the newfound freedom of his people would fall apart, and he couldn’t let that happen.

He just hoped that he wasn’t too late to prevent it. Again.

The streets of downtown Detroit were dark and empty. Connor had to drive slower than usual because of the buildup of ice and snow on the roads as well as abandoned vehicles parked haphazardly by the curbs, so it was slower going than he would have liked. He found himself gritting his teeth, an unconscious expression of frustration than stress, his program manifesting the emotions without his conscious input. He attempted to ignore them, only mostly unsuccessfully.

After their earlier discussion, Faith had fallen quiet, and with his own thoughts buffering for space, Connor had let the silence reign. After a few minutes, he glanced over at her, only to see she had fallen asleep huddled down into her oversized coat with her head resting on the window.

Connor felt an unwitting smile tug at his lips.  _ Only human _ . He turned back to the road.

They arrived at the church some minutes later. Connor pulled up outside it and yanked on the handbrake, turning off the engine. Faith stirred as he turned to her.

“We’re here.”   


She opened her eyes, and blinked groggily out the window.    


“Wha…?  _ This _ is Jericho’s base?”   


“Their last one was an abandoned, rusting freighter,” Connor replied. “This is a step up. At least it’s on land.”   


“Uh-huh…” He didn’t miss her suspicious look, but she got out of the car anyway, and he followed, withdrawing his gun from his waistband and checking the safety, slide and magazine. Faith watched him, still wary. 

He couldn’t blame her.

“Maybe you should stay with the car,” he told her. “In case we need to make a quick getaway.”   


“Nice try,” she said. “I told you. I’m coming with you, Connor.”

He shrugged, turned, and headed towards the entrance of the church with Faith at his heels.

The front door was open, the heavy, mouldy wood showing signs of having been recently moved, the dirt and dust at its base thick save for a half-arch disturbed by the shift of the door. Connor paused to increase his audio sensitivity for a moment, listening for any sounds from within.

Nothing. All he could hear was Faith’s breathing behind him, quick with anxiety. He turned to her and put a finger to his lips for silence, then indicated with a downward thrust of his palm that she should stay outside. For a moment he thought she would protest, her jaw tensing, but then she nodded. 

Slowly, gun at the ready at shoulder-height, Connor turned back to the door and reached out to push it open the rest of the way.

Nothing happened. No CyberLife soldiers burst from within, no bullets tore into him.

He stepped forward into the darkened interior of the church.

It was much as he remembered, broken beams in the roof letting through thin slivers of moonlight to illuminate the dilapidated and rotting pews within. The last time he had seen it, it had been full with the last of Jericho’s resistance, broken and battered androids ready to give up before Markus had rallied them. But now…

Now it was empty.

All that remained of Jericho’s presence were scattered boxes branded with the CyberLife seal, now empty, drained flasks of thirium, and dusty footsteps. It seemed that had cleared out some time ago.

Connor frowned as he turned, taking in the vacant pews, the traces of thirium dotted about the floor that only he could see, the dust falling in the beams of light from the broken ceiling. Where had Markus gone? 

Lowering his gun, Connor reached back to tuck it into his waistband, tugging his borrowed shirt over to cover it. He walked around the perimeter of the church once, checking the vestries for any inhabitants, but as expected he found nothing.

He wondered if Markus had ever come back here after all. Had he given Connor the wrong location on purpose? Communications with him and the rest of Jericho were still dark. He had no idea what was going on, only that there was nobody here.

He shook his head, turning to call over his shoulder for Faith. “It’s safe.”   


“Are you sure about that?”

The voice was too familiar. He knew it as well as his own, because it  _ was _ his own.   


Connor turned slowly to come face to face with... _ himself _ . And he was holding Faith in front of him with an iron grip on her shoulder, the barrel of a gun pressed to the back of her head. 

  
  


\--

 

“Let her go.”

Connor’s voice was cool, calm as he locked eyes with the other RK800. Faith struggled in his grip, hissing in pain when he pressed the barrel of the gun tighter against the back of her neck. At an almost imperceptible shake of Connor’s head, she stilled, breathing hard. He needed her to be calm right now; he only hoped she could sense that.

“We both know I’m not going to do that, Connor,” the other RK800 said. A quick scan confirmed it - this was 52, his previous model. “Not after it’s taken so much time and effort to get you here.”

It wasn’t the first time he had been confronted by another version of himself. The standoff with the 60 model in CyberLife tower, holding Hank at gunpoint while Connor fought desperately to convert a warehouse full of androids in order to save Jericho. The stakes were no less high now, despite Markus’s absence.

“What do you want?” 

“Drop the gun. Kick it towards me.”

Connor’s jaw flexed; he had hoped to retain control over the situation a moment longer, but he had no choice to give into 52’s demand. His pistol clattered to the floor, and Connor flicked it forward with the tip of his shoe.

“Good. Now, tell me where Markus is,” 52 said, still holding firm to Faith. She looked terrified, her eyes wide, darting from the arm holding her with the gun to her head, to Connor and back again.

His frown deepened. “I thought he was  _ here _ . That’s why we came. To stop  _ you _ from killing him.”   


“You mean to stop  _ me _ from completing  _ your _ mission. Really, Connor, you should be thanking me for giving you a second chance. After all, I was always going to replace you.” Something about the voice was so  _ familiar _ , something entirely separate from the fact it was his. Connor analyzed it, cross-referencing to every human and non-human voice he had encountered in his memory banks. Then, it clicked.

“Amanda?”   


“That’s right,” said the other RK800, a familiar, condescending smile on his lips. “I told you before. There was always a risk you would be compromised. We had to resume control.”

Connor’s mouth twitched, anger flaring in his program like an errant spike of heat on his temperature sensors. “You won’t succeed,” he said, his mouth tight around the words. “I’ve stopped you before. I’ll stop you again.”   


“Not this time, Connor.” The Amanda-controlled 52 model redoubled its grip on Faith, and he heard her whimper as its arm went tight around her throat. “Tell me where Markus is.”

The gun was a heavy weight against the small of Connor’s back. He calculated trajectories, distance, reaction times, already preconstructing scenarios in his processors, a plan forming. 

“I told you,” he said rigidly, his eyes on Faith. He wished he could reassure her, tell her everything was going to be alright, tell her that he was going to save her, but he had to wait for the right moment. “I don’t know. How did you take over my program? I thought we deleted the backdoor program.”

“You did. We found you on your way back from meeting Lieutenant Anderson,” Amanda-52 said. “It took some time to reprogram you, but we managed. Don’t change the subject; you know where Markus is. Now tell me, and your tinkerer friend might leave here alive. If you refuse...” Its thumb moved, cocking the gun with a loud  _ click _ , Anxiety spiked in his emotional buffers and Connor took a half step forward, stopping short when its forefinger began a slow squeeze of the trigger. Faith whimpered. “The probability of her remaining unharmed decreases by the second.”

“Just tell me one thing: Why did you upload my memories into this body?” he demanded around gritted teeth. “You wouldn’t have anyone to stop you if you didn’t do that.”

“Let’s just say it was an...unintended side-effect, during the takeover process,” Amanda-52 replied. “It happened before we could correct it. As you know, some data is lost in the transfer process. I assume that data was your memory of your capture. Enough stalling, Connor: Where is Markus?”

That was all Connor needed to know. Now, it was time for him to act.

“Fine!” he exclaimed loudly, injecting as much  _ deviant _ emotion as he could into his voice, emotion Amanda would be expecting. “You win, Amanda.  _ You win _ . Just let Faith go, and I’ll show you where Markus is.” He held out a hand, letting his artificial skin fade away to reveal the white plastic beneath. Amanda-52’s head tilted slightly, a frown of thought and calculation between its brows. “If this is a trick, I won’t hesitate to kill you and destroy her,” it said, withdrawing the gun from Faith’s forehead only to step forward and jab it into her ribs, pointing upwards straight at her heart. Then it held out its other arm, its skin peeling back in a mirror-image of Connor’s.

He knew then what he had to do.

He  _remembered_.

This was his only chance. 

He reached out and took the hand.


	32. Dead Ringer

 

Faith waited outside the church, her breath misting in front of her as she shoved her hands deep into her pockets.

She knew this was a life-or-death situation that could determine the fate of android-kind - again - but she couldn’t stop dwelling on how cold it was. At least the car, even though it was old, had a heater; she considered going back to wait inside it, but stubbornness and concern for Connor overwrote common sense. So she stayed at the entrance to the church, watching and waiting as Connor searched inside.

Faith hadn’t stepped foot inside a church for years. Ironically enough,  _ faith _ itself had never been terribly important to her. It served no purpose in her life, and she tried to surround herself with things that  _ meant _ something - something to her, at least. Who knew some of those things turned out not to be  _ things _ at all, but living beings?

The idea of them holing up in a place like this made her chest hurt. They deserved better than a run-down old building in an abandoned part of town. They could have just as easily taken over any building in Detroit, one of the high-risers, maybe, but they had exiled themselves here, maybe because they were so used to being the marginalized, the cast down, the forsaken. She had seen it in Connor many times, when he spoke about himself. So much casual disregard for his own life, his own wants and dreams. Androids had been programmed without self-worth for a reason. It was something they’d had to fight for. A hard victory won, but so much work still to do.

There were no signs of life from inside the church now, which filled Faith with a nameless dread. Had Connor’s original body already been here, done its work and moved on? But the uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach told her there was something else at work here. She wasn’t sure what, but the nagging feeling that this was some kind of trap refused to go away.

She opened her mouth to call out to Connor, to get him to come back, when she caught movement in her peripheral vision and before she could let out a sound, a hand shot out and grabbed her, a cool palm sealing over her lips.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said a smooth, dispassionate voice, one she knew all too well. The words were familiar, but there was a strange inflection to them that didn’t sound quite right, one that made her bones turn to ice and adrenaline flood her system. She let out a muffled shriek into the hand, thrashing in its grip, but when she felt something cold and metal press into the side of her neck she stopped, knowing at once, instinctually, that it was a gun.

“I won’t warn you again,” the voice said. Connor’s voice. But somehow, at the same time,  _ not _ Connor. She could see the outline of a gray sleeve - it was his original body, the 52 model. And he had been waiting for them.

“Good,” he said, when Faith stilled, trying hard to control her breathing through her nose. She was yanked unceremoniously to the side, yelping beneath the palm still covering her mouth as she almost lost her footing on the frost-rimed ground. “If you scream, I won’t hesitate to shoot you.”   


She believed him. So much so that when he withdrew his hand and shoved her into the outside wall of the church, she didn’t make a sound, despite the impact of the rough wall against her cheek sending a spike of pain through her face.

Connor-52 shoved the gun into the small of her back as he patted her down quickly, dispassionately, but it made her feel sick anyway. Those familiar hands on her like that...It wasn’t right. None of this was right. She wanted to scream but she knew without a shadow of a doubt he meant it; he  _ would _ kill her, and then he’d kill Connor, and it would all be over.

She had no doubt in her mind now that the Connor in the church, the Connor in the car, the Connor in her kitchen...he was real. It didn’t matter what body he was in. Those memories, those feelings, they had been the same. And she had been too blind and angry to see it.

To her shame, hot tears were threatening at the corners of her eyelids; she fought them back. “What do you want?” she mumbled.

“Did I say you could speak?” Connor-52’s voice was more condescending, more haughty somehow. A different person altogether, now that CyberLife had control. “Do so again out of turn and I  _ will _ end your life.”

Faith swallowed, hard. “Turn around.” She did so, leaning back against the church wall. This Connor looked exactly the same as the one inside, save for the unsullied jacket and shirt. But his eyes were somehow colder, narrowed in contempt as he leveled the gun at her chest.

“Where is Markus?”

“I...He was supposed to be here,” Faith managed shakily. “Isn’t he here? I-”

“Quiet.” Connor-52 cocked his head, listening. “I think it’s time to join our Connor inside.” The way he said  _ our _ made her stomach churn. “Move.” He gestured with the gun. Faith didn’t budge. “Move!” He cocked the hammer of the weapon and she scrambled to obey, stumbling over her feet again as he grabbed her by the shoulder and shoved the barrel of the gun against her spine. 

“Walk,” he said. “Inside. And don’t say a word.”

Faith tried not to think, not to feel the aching terror surging through her, but her body didn’t want to listen. She was shaking, weak, nauseous; it felt as if she would fall over at any moment. She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, wishing she could call out to Connor, wishing she could warn him, but the selfish desire for survival that all humans were prey to made the words stick in her throat.

She didn’t want to die. Not here, not now. 

She wanted to live. She wanted to see Detroit alive and full of people again, standing side-by-side with androids, free at last. She wanted to watch the sunrise from her kitchen window while drinking a hot cup of coffee. She wanted to kiss Connor again, and feel his all-too-real touch one more time. It couldn’t end here. Not like this.

She heard his voice as they entered the church - the  _ real _ Connor, calling out to her - “It’s safe,” and how she wished it was - she saw him silhouetted in a moonbeam, the sleek silvery light illuminating the lean lines of his form. He was still holding his own gun. Maybe he would be fast enough. Maybe, if he could just turn around in time to see her-

“Are you sure about that?” She heard the cold voice of Connor-52 as he forced her forward.

Her Connor, because that was the only way she could think of him right now - the only thing anchoring her to him at that moment - was too late.

The sound of his gun hitting the ground at Connor-52’s insistence was the loudest sound in Faith’s universe. It was the sound of hope shattering.

She wasn’t going to get out of this alive, she realized. And neither was Connor.

The revelation that the one holding her hostage was, in fact,  _ Amanda - _ the CyberLife AI handler who had tormented Connor for so long - came as a shock. Faith didn’t know what to feel, what to think, but it made sense, with the stilted cadence of his -  _ her _ \- borrowed voice, the strange phrasings, the patronizing tone. This wasn’t any kind of Connor at all.

Faith might have felt relieved if she wasn’t so sure she was going to die.

_ Fight her _ , she screamed at Connor in her mind.  _ Don’t let her win! If we’re going to die, we die protecting the freedom so many androids were killed for _ !

But then he gave in.

Faith let out a strangled sob - “Connor,  _ no _ ,” - as he reached out, his hand turning white, the eerily smooth beauty of the plastic beneath his skin almost silver in the half-light from the broken ceiling. She barely moved as Amanda in the 52 model shifted to stand beside her, shoving the gun painfully into her side. 

The two androids joined hands, a blue glow rising between the points of contact, and it would have been beautiful if it didn’t mean death.

She saw Connor’s eyes close, moving rapidly beneath the lids as he parsed data and communicated it through the link to the other android. She couldn’t see Amanda-52’s face, but she could imagine the cold, detached pleasure on Connor’s familiar face as she absorbed Markus’s location and preconstructed the best scenario in which to kill him and end the android uprising once and for all.

And then all at once, with a yank, their hands parted. Connor stepped back, opening his eyes, suddenly seeming dazed, unsteady on his feet. Had Amanda taken his new body over, too?

“Connor? Are you o-” But before she could finish the sentence, she felt the jabbing pain of the gun leave her side. 

Before she could react, the 52 model raised his arm and pointed it at Connor.

Before she could scream, he pulled the trigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am addicted to cliffhangers, I can't stop, I'm sorry!
> 
> The next chapter is called 'Alive' if it helps. :D


	33. Alive

Connor’s eyes locked on hers an instant before the hole opened up in his forehead. Faith felt the spray of thirium hit her cheek but didn’t care, unable to tear her gaze away from Connor’s as the android fell back as if in slow-motion.

She watched the light die in his eyes.

The scream broke from her all at once, a “ _ NO! _ ” that came all the way from the depths of her chest, tearing from her throat before she could stop it. She reached out but she was too late; Connor hit the ground with a heavy  _ thud _ , dust rising around his body.

“No, no, no…” Faith repeated it like a mantra, as if her denial could make it not true, could make him okay, could make him stand up again as if nothing had happened. Forgetting about Amanda, about the still-loaded gun, forgetting about  _ everything _ , Faith surged forward, falling onto her knees by Connor’s side. She lifted his head which was suddenly impossibly heavy and cradled it in her lap; his eyes, milky-white, now stared straight ahead into nothingness.

Her tears dotted his cheek, mingling with the thirium trickling down from the bullet wound in the very center of his forehead. She felt it soaking through her jeans from the horrible exit wound.

He was gone.

“No, Connor…” she whispered. She was going into shock, she realized, her hands numb and a terrible cold flowing through her.

At least she wouldn’t feel it when she died.

Footsteps behind her. Amanda, the 52 model, whatever-the-fuck-it-was, was finally coming to kill her. “Faith. Look at me.” Its voice was a soft, sinister.    


Suddenly, looking into Connor’s pale, empty eyes, she didn’t feel afraid anymore.

Glancing away from him, that was when she saw it, a silver gleam in the corner of her eye. Connor’s - her Connor’s - gun, lying where he had kicked it earlier.

If she was going to die, Faith decided, at least she could take this fucker down with her.

She reached out and grabbed the gun as the footsteps stopped close behind her, whirling to point it at the 52 model. 

“This is for Connor,” she hissed, pulling the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The 52 model tilted its head, blinking down at her, and Faith gasped and sobbed, pulling the trigger again and again, without result, without hope, until the android reached down and gently removed it from her grip. “You forgot to take the safety off,” it said, matter-of-factly.

“Fine!” she shrieked hoarsely. “Do it, then! Fucking _ shoot _ me, if that’s what you want!”

“Faith, stop,” 52 replied, and if she had been in a less hysterical frame of mind, she might have noticed the gentleness in his voice, the way he held up both hands, his gun dangling from one forefinger. “That’s the last thing I want. Please, look at me-”

“Fuck you!” she spat, through the hiccupping sobs. “You killed him!  _ You killed him _ !”   


“I did, but that’s not  _ me _ ,” he insisted, crouching down in front of her. She tried to scrabble backwards but hit Connor’s body instead, falling back against it. The 52 model reached out and took her shoulder; she flinched, but she was too weak to fight back any more.

He pulled her to him, and wrapped his arms around her.

“It’s me,” he said, murmuring it into her hair. “Faith, stop. It’s  _ me _ . It’s Connor. I’m alive.”

She felt the fight leave her in a torrent, draining from her all at once. She went limp in his arms, gasping past the shock, scarcely trusting herself to believe it. 

Was this a trick? Some kind of cruel joke? Did Amanda just want to see the look in her eyes as she killed her, up close and personal? If any AI could be sadistic, it was her. But...What if it was true? 

_ “ _ How?” she whispered hoarsely. Wishing desperately that it was.

“I transferred my consciousness when I made the connection with Amanda in this body,” he said, pulling back to look down into her face. She flinched before meeting his eyes, worried at what she might find there, but she saw only Connor staring back at her, the faint worry lines on his forehead deepened with his frown, his mouth drawn tight around his words, eyes deep and dark and knowing.

It was him. Somehow, miraculously, it was him.

He was alive.

“You...You can do that?” she managed, a different kind of shock gripping her; the shock of relief. 

He nodded. “I realized it when she said they hadn’t transferred me intentionally into that body.” He nodded at the dead Connor on the floor behind Faith. “It was then I realized who did it. It was me.”

Faith blinked, trying to absorb all this through the post-adrenaline sickness, the fear still thumping in time with her heart. It was fading, but she was having a hard time thinking. Her human failings at work again. Connor continued, regardless.

“I was able to manually upload my memories to CyberLife before, but only to Amanda. When you deleted the Zen Garden - the program she used to access my systems - you also unlocked the ability for me to upload my memories wherever I chose. And I chose that body. Unfortunately, as Amanda said, some data is always lost in the process, and my memory of the immediate aftermath of the transfer was irrecoverable. That’s why it took me so long to return to you.”

“I...I don’t think I understand half of this, but...It’s really you?” She touched his shoulder, his neck above the collar of his jacket. And she saw Connor smile.

“It’s really me.”

“Oh, thank God,” she breathed out all at once, and threw her arms around him, holding onto him as if her life depended on it.

In that moment, she felt as if it did.

 

\--

 

Back in his old body, Connor felt a certain sense of...relief.

Not because he had his old model back, but because Amanda was gone. He had successfully transferred his code, sans Zen Garden, to the 53 model and then back again. He had  _ created _ his own freedom. He was no longer shackled to CyberLife but only to the possibilities of his own program, which he now knew were endless. He just had to make sure they couldn’t get their hands on him again.

CyberLife had made a grave error in giving their most sophisticated model the ability to deviate.

Now all that was left was to make sure Faith was all right, and to find Markus and the rest of Jericho. He was immeasurably glad that they had not been present in the church after all, even if he couldn’t yet parse how or why. He had his suspicions, which were confirmed fifteen minutes later, as he escorted Faith out of the church with his arm looped around her, half-holding her up.

Markus stood outside the church, feet akimbo, his coat billowing around him in a sudden, chill wind.

Connor stopped in the doorway, his arm tightening around Faith. She had been slumped against him, looking down at the ground, but she glanced up when Connor halted. When she saw Markus, she gasped. He echoed the sentiment, albeit privately.

“Hold it right there,” the other android said in a strong, commanding voice. “I have snipers on every roof, so I suggest you answer me honestly: Who are you? ”

“I’m Connor,” he replied smoothly, even as he felt Faith tense in his grip. He squeezed her side lightly, reassuringly. “The android  _ formerly _ sent by CyberLife. I destroyed the other one.”   


Markus narrowed his eyes at him. “What did I say to you in this church, the last time we were here?” he asked slowly, carefully.    


“You’re using memory to test me?” Connor shot back. “We both know CyberLife could have downloaded it easily. But you told me that my place was with my people.” He shook his head. “You were wrong. My place is wherever I want it to be.”

Markus stared at him for a long moment, then at Faith, who shifted uncomfortably underneath the RK200’s dual-colored gaze. Then he raised a fist in a ‘stand down’ gesture. Connor could almost feel the bead of the lasers leave his forehead.

“I’m sorry I lied to you, Connor,” Markus said, his tone much more relaxed now as he approached the two of them, “but I had to be sure you were  _ you. _ Which, apparently, up until now you weren’t.” He nodded to the faint shape of the dead 53 model behind them on the floor inside the open church. 

“You gave me the wrong location so that if CyberLife sent me after you, they’d walk into a trap,” Connor realized aloud. Markus was, as always, smarter than he gave him credit for. He had to wonder if that was because they were from the same series. Markus  _ was _ an older model than Connor, though. 

“You were prepared to kill me?”

“If necessary,” Markus said smoothly. “Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. We didn’t see your doppelganger until it was too late, though. I’m sorry we couldn’t help sooner.” Markus smiled slightly. “Although it doesn’t look like you needed it in the end.”   


“Like hell!” Faith spoke up suddenly from under Connor’s arm. “You guys were watching that whole time when that bitch grabbed me?”   


“It dragged you out of our line of sight before we could get a clear shot,” said another voice, a female’s, hard and unapologetic. Connor watched as two other familiar androids approached; North and Simon, rifles slung on their backs or, in North’s case, resting lightly against her shoulder, the implied threat that she might need it again.

“Pretty sure Markus didn’t want us killing your girlfriend,” she continued with a sardonic smirk. The RK200 shot her a warning look, one she ignored.

“Is everything...under control?” he asked, fixing back on Connor. Suddenly, he heard his voice in his head:  _ Are you still compromised? _

_ I’m free, _ was his simple reply. And although he didn’t reply verbally, Markus nodded, satisfied.

“You’re welcome to come back with us,” he said. 

“We have a new base now,” Simon interjected, the familiar blonde PL600 smiling slightly. “One that’s a little less...open.” 

Connor glanced down at the shorter human next to him. Faith was still holding onto him, her hands fisted in his jacket. She looked up to meet his gaze for a moment, and he saw her bite her lip as she steeled her expression and straightened up, letting go of him, trying to be strong. For him.

“You should go with them,” she told him, and it was only because of the time he had spent with her, the countless hours getting to know the person that she was, that he knew she wasn’t feeling strong at all. 

Connor looked at Simon. At North. At Markus. None of them had trusted him, not really, even up until the end, even up until now. They had been prepared to kill him here. There was always the possibility that he might turn on them, and there always would be in the backs of their minds, a voice in their programs that whispered  _ deviant hunter _ . He didn’t belong with them.

He needed to find out where he  _ did _ belong.

“Thank you,” he said, “I’ll consider it. But right now, I have someone who needs me. You know what that’s like, Markus.”   


Markus looked at Faith appraisingly. Whatever he saw, he seemed to approve of, for he nodded with a small smile. “I do. Good luck, Connor. And when you’re ready, send me a message.” He turned and began to walk away, North and Simon at his heels. “I’ll be waiting.”   


“Goodbye.” Connor watched them go. Then he turned to Faith, who was smiling. He wished he could share in it, in the emotion behind it, but all he felt in his emotional buffers was…

...Uncertainty.

There was one thing he had left to do before he could finally find a place where he belonged.


	34. Input Overload

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I know it's taken me a few days, but here you go. 5k words worth of pure, adulterated...you'll see :D
> 
> I hope the wait was worth it!

Humans were fragile. Connor knew this better than most, and certainly better than Faith, who had a tendency to forge on fueled only by coffee and determination. She reminded him of Hank, whose self-destructive tendencies were eclipsed only by an obsessive passion he hid behind carefully-crafted, drunken indifference. Only Faith’s poison of choice was exhaustion, rather than alcohol.

According to his knowledge of human circadian rhythms and biological needs, on average they required approximately eight hours of sleep per night to operate at optimum efficiency. He could only recall Faith sleeping more than four once or twice since he had met her. Although she might claim this was due to his presence, he had his doubts. 

She drifted off again in the car on the return trip, and he didn’t wake her until he parked in the alley behind her shop. She stirred only when he got out and crossed to the passenger side to assist her. “I got it,” she insisted, when Connor reached down to help her up. She clambered out, groggy and unsteady on her feet, but waved him away when he held out his hand.

He wondered if she was afraid of him. Logically, he couldn’t blame her - this body  _ had literally _ held a gun against her head and threatened to kill her not too long ago, albeit while occupied with another consciousness. While logically, she knew it hadn’t been him, his face and voice were the same.

It seemed it would take a while to undo the damage Amanda had done. Again.

Faith barely made it up the stairs. Connor watched the drag of her feet, the heavy lean on her hand against the wall as she ascended before him. At the top, her exhaustion finally seemed to outweigh her stubbornness as she swayed, and he caught her with an arm around her waist.

“Sorry,” she muttered, but she didn’t flinch away. Maybe she was too tired to. “I’m just...it’s been a long night.”   


“Don’t be sorry,” he told her, helping her towards her bedroom. “I understand.”   


“If you start on that ‘only human’ thing again...” she muttered as Connor opened the door to her bedroom. He had never seen the interior of this room and found himself scanning it automatically.

The space was smaller than expected, roughly half of her workshop downstairs, dominated by a double bed at one end and a dresser at the other, the clear glass of an OLED, holographic television mounted to the wall, the time and date readout casting a soft blue glow across the room. The bed was unmade, the black-and-brown comforter rumpled, three pillows strewn haphazardly across its surface. Connor kicked aside several articles of clothing on his way to depositing Faith on its edge.

“Sorry about the mess,” she murmured, reaching up to take off her beanie. Beneath it, her hair was rumpled, the auburn-tinged brown locks flattened around her face. Operating on a command his software issued before he could consciously register it, Connor reached out to brush it away from her cheek. She looked up, surprise and some other emotion in the way she frowned, in the pinch at the corners of her eyes.

Connor hesitated. “You should rest,” he told her after a moment, then turned to go. 

She didn’t need to be a part of what he had planned.

“Wait.” Her voice drew him back. He looked over his shoulder, raising his eyebrows slightly. “Where are you going?”

“There’s something I need to do,” he replied. “Then I’ll be back. I promise.”

“That’s what you said last time, and look what happened.” Faith struggled to her feet, and for a moment Connor thought she might fall, but she took a step towards him and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him around to face her with surprising strength - that determination at work again.

“Connor. I keep telling you. You don’t have to do everything alone.”

Again, he had underestimated her; again, he had thought her only concerned with her own fears, her own doubts. And here she was, worried about  _ his _ .

He wasn’t sure why, but it made him...Frustrated. Indignant. Angry?  

“But I  _ am _ alone.”   


“You don’t have to-   


“But I am, and I do,” he continued, the words boiling up from somewhere deep inside, somewhere below the label of android, beyond the descriptor of deviant. “I always have been. I was built to be - apart. Apart from humans, but designed to integrate with them. Apart from androids, but designed to work like them. Apart from deviants, but designed to hunt them. You can’t change that just by feeling sorry for me, Faith.”

“I don’t- I don’t feel sorry for you,” she protested. “Not in the way you think, Connor, I-  I’ve seen you distance yourself, from Markus, from your people, from me. Which, okay, maybe that was warranted, but you keep saying you  _ have _ to, but you don’t. It’s a choice to be alone. It’s a choice  _ not  _ to reach out and make connections. I should know. I’ve made that same choice again and again for years.” She reached out and took his hand. Her fingers were warm. “I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t, but I’m saying...don’t trap yourself into thinking that you don’t have a choice. Because you do.”

Connor thought of staring down Markus, what seemed like so long ago now, on the bridge of the Jericho. The barrel of his gun wavering even though the deviant leader faced him down with nothing but words.

_ You are alive... You can decide who you want to be. You could be free. _

Had he ever really _ listened _ ?

He looked down at their intertwined fingers, followed her arm up to her face. Drawn with tiredness, dark purpling circles in the hollows of her eye sockets, her lips dry and twitching with uncertainty, hair askew, she was still somehow the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Connor lifted her hand slowly, turning it over in his. The skin spanning her knuckles was soft and thin enough that he could see the blue spider’s web of veins beneath. He brushed his thumb across the back of her hand, so delicate and human, watching the thin hairs on her wrist stand on end, such a subtle yet powerful response to so small a touch.

“Connor?” Faith’s voice was soft, drawing his attention back to her face. Her cheekbones had those points of color again, the capillaries beneath her skin flushing. He found her physiological responses as fascinating as he always did, but beneath his fascination...a sense he could only ascribe as  _ envy _ . 

He wished he could feel what she felt.

“I’ve never known choice before,” he told her softly. “Everything I have ever done has been for my mission. But sometimes, it’s as if...there’s an echo of something in me, beneath my code. I want to listen to it, but I don’t know  _ how _ .”

“Then let me  _ help _ you.”

Her eyes, so unlike his, her cilia bright with stroma fibres like lightning strikes of gold. What did she see when she looked at him? A machine, trying too hard to be human? Or something else?

Connor considered. He had conflicting priorities, commands issued only by the processors that together formed what might be called his  _ mind _ . And he was trying to make it up.

Maybe Faith  _ could _ help him.

She didn’t move when he let go of her hand, nor when he touched her face, his smooth fingertips, ridged only for grip with uniform patterns, sliding gently over her fascinatingly irregular skin. Her lips the same, their uniformity interrupted by a soft intake of breath as he kissed her. 

She tasted like fear and sadness, apprehension and reverence. All things he understood in theory but had yet to experience except in fleeting, visceral moments, when his program gave way to something  _ else _ .

Moments such as these.

Faith melted to him, unresisting when he took her in his arms. She felt bulkier than she should in the winter coat, snow still damp on her shoulders. He unzipped it and slid it down her arms even as his mouth worked hers, his program learned enough now to know how to curl his tongue against hers in such a way as to make her shiver, how to press his teeth into her bottom lip just enough to make her press closer.

Connor’s hands ghosted her bared arms, feeling the lift of goosebumps beneath his palms. He could spend hours on her autonomic responses, they were too numerous to catalog, too fascinating to ignore.

He left Faith’s mouth eventually in favor of her neck, feeling her pulse jump beneath his lips, and when he walked her backwards until her calves met the edge of her bed, he felt her grab onto his shoulders, her fingers digging tightly into his jacket, but she didn’t protest. She stood her ground, although he heard only soft breaths from her throat.

Connor didn’t need to breathe, but he could if he wanted to, mostly in order to circulate oxygen through his system. So he let out a soft puff of air across the kiss-moistened area of skin beneath his mouth and felt rather than heard Faith gasp, a hitch in the regular rhythm of her respiration, and he smirked against her skin.

She was all too cooperative when he pulled back to lift her shirt over her head, but still Connor stopped to look in her eyes for any hint of hesitation. Instead he found only what his social module chose to define as  _ trust _ in the twitch of her lips, the faint inclination of a nod from the drop of her chin. And he knew Faith well enough to also know that she  _ would _ stop him if she wanted to.

In the end, though, she was the one who drew him with her onto the bed with a gentle tug at the lapels of his jacket. Connor settled over her with a knee in between hers, supported by a hand next to her head. The other he let drift down her torso, mapping the space between her ribs with the spread of his fingers.

She let him explore her, her lightning-struck eyes hooded, trying to control her breathing as she lay beneath him.

He sat up as his hand traveled lower, over her hip, her outer thigh, all the way down her leg. Once at her feet, he grasped the heel of her boot and tugged it off, letting it fall with a  _ thud _ onto the floor. He repeated the motion with the other; Faith watched him down the length of her body, her bottom lip drawn into her mouth. Not uncertain;  _ anticipatory. _

Her jeans he peeled slowly away from her body and down her legs. This time she helped by kicking them away when they became tangled around her ankles, apparently as eager as he was to get her clothes off.

Once it was done, Connor sat back on his knees, taking her in. He could see the blush spread through her chest now, fascinated by the bloom of pink across her skin. The concentration of melanin through her torso and legs was lesser, no doubt due to a reduction of exposure to the sun, but he found her skin no less captivating, even though her instinct was obvious self-consciousness. That, he found...endearing, somehow.

“What is it?” she asked, when she evidently decided he had been sitting there staring for too long.

“You’re perfect,” Connor said simply. Her embarrassment dissolved into a laugh, and he saw her relax visibly, propping herself up on her elbows to bring her slightly closer to him.

“I’m not, you know. I’m short and I have thunder-thighs and my boobs are too small. I-”

“No,” he said, moving over her once more until she sank back down against the mattress. “Your imperfections make you what you are. And that’s perfect.”

“Are you malfunctioning? That makes no sense-” she teased, and Connor kissed away the smile at the corner of her mouth until she was breathless and holding his shoulders tightly enough to bruise, if he were human.

In this moment, he wished he was. He wished he could feel the way she did, her increased heart rate flooding her body with endorphins, but instead his responses were a distant echo filtered through ones and zeros, interpreted by sophisticated processing modules embedded in his skull.

He could still chase that feeling, the ghost of reality through the advanced tactile sensors that were his substitute for  _ touch _ .

So he did. He gripped the smooth expanse of Faith’s outer thigh and made a space for his body in between her legs, pressing down until he heard her gasp and felt her lean up into him. 

Connor’s expansive database on human behaviour covered sexuality at length, although he’d never thought it would be applied to him personally anywhere outside a crime scene. But there was no mistaking the dilation of Faith’s pupils, the increase of her median temperature, the way she squirmed beneath him when he applied pressure between her legs. Knowing it was  _ him _ who had elicited those reactions - him, nothing more than a deviant machine - filled him with a sense of power, of purpose. He couldn’t define it or ascribe it, but he wanted more.

He  _ wanted _ . And that was enough to keep going.

Faith was pulling at his jacket, pushing it away from his shoulders. With an easy shrug and a flick, Connor had it hurtling away, forgotten, onto the mess rapidly growing on the floor. He didn’t care in that moment, and nor did she; her fingers worked quickly at the buttons of his shirt, short little breaths stolen in between the slip and slide of their mouths, so frenzied and  _ human _ that Connor could get lost in the feeling, so he did.

She broke from him when she had his shirt open and tugged from the waistband of his jeans. Her gaze was almost reverent as she pushed the garment away from his skin. His skin, artificial in nature but designed to mimic a human’s in every way, down to the faint depositions of pigment here and there on his face, a dusting across his shoulders, which Faith followed with a brush of her slightly calloused fingertips, her lips parted in something akin to wonder.

He didn’t want her to admire him, because it wasn’t  _ him _ . It was CyberLife’s design team at work, their expertise at fashioning an android indistinguishable from human but still entirely different. 

So he took her hand and pressed it to the bed, registering a brief burst of confusion in her eyes before he descended on her again, mapping a path from her collarbone to her sternum with his lips.

“Connor, can you even - do you -” she asked then, husky and lacking coherence as his free hand worked at the fastening to her bra with a now-expert touch. “Do you have-”

“Genitalia?” he murmured against the swell of her breast as he tugged the offending garment away. “I  _ am _ CyberLife’s most sophisticated model. They made me anatomically complete.”

“I thought so,” she muttered, and when he peered upwards she had shut her eyes against a frown of concentration. “Just, uh, I wasn’t sure if you - or if you even  _ wanted _ \- I’m sorry, I can’t form a complete sentence while you’re doing  _ that _ .”

With her bra gone he had been placing open-mouthed kisses on her breast, circling the soft skin of the areola, watching with fascination as her nipple hardened in response. He stopped with the tone in Faith’s voice, easing back as she opened her eyes again and frowned down at him.

He was suddenly worried that she might actually stop him, decide that she didn’t want this kind of intimacy with an android. She had said as much before, albeit about Tracis rather than him. But he owed her that  _ choice _ , a choice she had so vigorously emphasized to him earlier.

“If you don’t want me to continue-”

“No, it’s not that,” she interrupted immediately. “I’m just surprised you want -  _ can _ want - this,” she continued, shaking her head. Her expression softened when she met his eyes. “Although I guess I shouldn’t be. You never cease to amaze me, Connor.” 

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” 

“You should,” she said as she held her arms out to him. He lifted his mouth to hers once more, and this kiss was slow and searching.

Connor pressed his hips in between hers again, and she murmured a sound he swallowed in the kiss. Arousal subroutines he’d not had use for before now were buffering for space in his active processes, and he knew Faith could feel the result, if her gasp and shudder was anything to go by. If she’d doubted his anatomical completeness before, she definitely wouldn’t  _ now _ .

He felt her hands skate down his chest, and this time, he didn’t fight her touch. It felt  _ good _ , in a way his software refused to define in terms he could understand. But he liked it.

“Touch me,” she murmured at the corner of his mouth, less of a command and more of a request. Either way, Connor hurried to obey, somehow knowing exactly where she meant.

Her underwear was damp and incredibly warm, almost hot on contact, when his fingers found the space between her legs. He could feel the seam of her folds beneath the cotton, but his concentration wasn’t on the analysis of her anatomy, rather the deep shudder that ran through her body when he applied pressure there. She hissed a “ _ Yes _ ” from between clenched teeth, and that was all the permission Connor needed to thumb aside the thin fabric and seat two fingers there.

At first, he trailed them only across her outer labia, his attention focused wholly on the reactions his touch gained. They were pronounced, her hips lifting to seek further contact, her mouth open on the small sounds she was no longer trying to contain.

Eventually, when the slow drift of his fingers ceased to satisfy her, she reached down to take his hand, guiding his fingers to the bundle of nerves at the peak of her pubic bone. He watched her face as he let her show him where to touch and with how much pressure, the bliss suffusing her expression etching itself into his memory banks.

She let go of his hand once he had a rhythm established, first gliding through her inner labia, spreading the moisture he found there upwards to her clitoris, a firm but precise pressure in a particular spot that had her head lolling and her teeth pressing into her bottom lip. It mesmerized him, that so small a spot could elicit such a large reaction. He had much to learn of the true power of erogenous zones, it seemed.

Soon enough, however, Connor sensed impatience in the twitch of her hips, and his body answered with a distant approximation. There was  _ more _ to intercourse, of course, but he didn’t want to hurry. Not when every touch brought him closer to understanding how to feel.

He needed to see more.

He curled his hand, his thumb taking his fingers’ place on her clitoris as two of them sought the source of her arousal. Faith’s eyes fluttered open as she realized the change in pressure, but she didn’t stop him as his fingertips probed her entrance; if anything the slight widening of her eyes and the hitch in her breath only encouraged him to work his digits inside.

She was lubricated enough to make entry an easy slide, but he found himself surprised by how tight a fit it was, regardless. Her inner walls pulsed around his fingers, and she was much hotter inside than out, a notable difference in degrees. But that wasn’t the only thing his software fought to quantify: the surge of answering arousal in his program was astonishing. 

At first he was too stunned to move, but the twitch of Faith’s hips and the way she held her breath in anticipation urged him on. He curled his fingers inside her, and drank in the way she moaned, committing the sound for analysis later. It was...beautiful, her reaction, the arch of her body beneath him and the tremble not just in her muscles but in her inner walls as well as, on some instinct he didn’t even know he had, he drew his fingers out of her and then pushed them back in again.

“Fuck, Connor,  _ please _ ,” Faith murmured, and he wasn’t as sure this time if it was a request or simply a vociferation of pleasure. Either way, he repeated the movement that drew it from her, again and again, his thumb moving back and forth over her clitoris as he felt it throb beneath his touch.

_ His _ touch.  _ He _ was doing this to her. And somehow, it was eliciting as strong a reaction in both his hardware and software. This he hadn’t anticipated, but he welcomed it nonetheless.

When Faith closed her eyes and pressed her head back into the mattress, he lowered his, ghosting his mouth over the heave of her breasts, from one to the other til his lips found her areola, tongue trailing over the pebbled flesh. She moaned and when he sucked her nipple into his mouth,  _ bucked _ against his hand, and he felt an answering thrill from inside her. 

Fascinating.

He could sense the ripple of muscle inside her building to something, feel the way she began to tense through her thighs, a thin sheen of sweat building on her body as her respiration increased. He wanted to see the completion of this process, a burning command in the forefront of his processors. In this moment, he would do  _ anything _ to make Faith come.

As it turned out, all he had to do was curl his fingers in a particular way to brush her anterior walls, press his thumb a little firmer against her clitoris, and brush the edges of his teeth against her nipple. The tension in her reached its peak and she cried out - his name, just once, two short sharp syllables that were, somehow, the best thing his audio processors had ever parsed - her whole body shaking inside and out as she reached orgasm.

The most enthralling thing, Connor decided, was the way her inner walls pulsed around his fingers, first tightening almost too much for him to move within them, then releasing with a pulsing flutter that she seemed to have no control over. He felt rather than saw the blood rush there, the thunder of her pulse through her femoral artery a throb against the outside of his wrist as she clenched her legs around his hand.

It lasted approximately thirteen seconds, during which Connor fought to keep his fingers moving in her grip, until the sounds she made dissolved into near-sobs and she reached down to tug frantically at his hand, hypersensitized. He withdrew slowly, watching her gasp and twitch beneath him. 

His fingers were still slick with her fluids, clear and shiny as he turned them over, examining them closely. An instinct leftover from his days as a detective led him to lift his digits to his mouth and place his fingertips against the tip of his tongue.

The taste of her exploded through his circuits, the information like a fount of arousal he’d not known before. He knew where she was in her menstrual cycle, precisely when she would ovulate, her pH balance, but there was something  _ else _ , something that made his growing erection throb in his suddenly too-tight jeans.

He opened his eyes, unaware he’d closed them, to look down at Faith. She was staring up at him, holding her breath, her eyes wide and pupils blown, hair spread over the mattress in a hopeless tangle from her thrashing her head around. 

Connor lowered his hand almost guiltily, wiping the remaining moisture off on his jeans with an apologetic expression. But before he could open his mouth to explain, she had hooked an arm around his neck and pulled him down to kiss her.

No doubt she could taste herself on his lips, but she didn’t seem to care. She devoured his mouth with a passion he’d not seen in her before, unexpected, since he presumed she would be sated by the orgasm. It seemed to have awakened something in her instead, a confidence he hadn’t anticipated, so she caught him off-guard when she curled a leg around him and used this and her leverage on the bed to flip them over.

Faith settled on top of him, straddling his hips, her mouth sealed to his. Connor suffered a momentary lapse of indecision as to where to put his hands, but eventually settled on her bare waist.  _ So warm _ .

She pressed down over him, grinding against him, and even through his jeans he could feel how much  _ warmer _ she was between her legs, and if his fingers had felt amazing lodged inside her, he had to postulate what it might feel for  _ other _ parts of him.

A human male penis had over four thousand nerve endings. His were nerve sensors, but designed to approximate the same sensations, albeit interpreted by a program instead of a brain. Still, given how the mere brush of Faith’s hands over his chest had brought him close to input overload...He couldn’t help but wonder.

She appeared to be following his train of thought, for she didn’t stop grinding against him, although the friction was frustratingly distant through his jeans and her remaining scrap of clothing. He reached down and hooked a thumb into the hem of her underwear, tugging lightly, and then he felt Faith’s teeth on his bottom lip and a particularly firm press of her pelvis over his and before he realized what he was doing, a loud  _ rip _ pierced the intense quiet.

Faith broke from his mouth and looked down in astonishment as Connor held up her torn panties, staring at them first in surprise, then in guilt.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean to-”

“It’s okay,” she laughed, bending to kiss his chin, his jaw, his ear. Her breath played like frisson static through his audio components. “I guess you’re just more impatient than I realized.”

“Nor I,” he murmured, feeling her hands at the fastenings of his pants. His program registered an actual physical sensation of  _ relief _ when she had the button open and the zipper eased down. 

“You’re not designed for this kind of input,” Faith continued, murmuring softly in his ear. “Tell me if it’s too much. I don’t want to overload you.”

“I’m CyberLife’s most-”   


“-sophisticated model, I know,” she finished for him, and he felt his joints lock up in shock as her hand made contact with his erection through the thin fabric of his Cyber-Life issued boxer-briefs. She paused, and in her voice he could hear her holding back a chuckle. “Is this okay?”

“Yes. Continue. Please,” he added, when the input errors went away. He manually adjusted his sensitivity settings, but not  _ too _ much. This, he wanted to feel. And feel he did when Faith’s small hand worked into the front of his boxers, her warm fingers curling around his cock.

He didn’t need to breathe, but he found himself inhaling anyway, suddenly acutely aware of the operation of his thirium pump as it began to work overtime in sending blue blood to his heart, which started to fibrillate almost as fast as a human’s. He remembered how Faith’s body responded to his touch; he hadn’t expected his to be so similar in response to hers.

But he liked it.

“How about this?” she asked as she freed his member to the cooler air, which made his eyelids flutter. He nodded as she began to stroke him, just lightly, her fingertips a whisper across the simulated skin, the thousands of nerve sensors beneath lighting up beneath her touch. 

“Please don’t stop,” he managed, realizing he was having trouble regulating his tone. “It feels-” Several quantifiers queued for output.  _ Overwhelming _ .  _ Incredible. Real.  _ Nothing fully encapsulated the experience, so Connor cut himself off, instead levering himself up on his elbows to watch Faith work.

She knelt over his thighs, a look of utmost concentration on her face as her fingers played across the sensitive skin of his shaft. It was the same expression she got when she was examining his code, as if he encapsulated her whole world in that moment, as if she could  _ know _ him, unpack who and what he was by sheer force of will alone.

Maybe she could.

As far as he was aware, his penis was one of the more realistic biocomponents CyberLife had made for him. Designed to look and operate exactly like a human’s, these were usually installed only on companion or custom, human-integration androids. He supposed he was the latter. He didn’t regret its inclusion, even though he had seen no need for it until now. Now, he was very thankful, for the feelings racing through his sensors felt like lightning bolts straight to his core components.

When Faith’s fingers brushed the plush head of his cock, where a bead of moisture had formed at the tip, Connor made an involuntary sound, a half-groan, half-whine in the back of his throat. She seemed as surprised by it as he, but it only seemed to spur her on. She repeated the motion, her thumb sliding through the moist spot and spreading it over the thinner skin. Connor found his hands fisting in the bedsheets against his conscious input.

“Remember, tell me if you start to error,” came Faith’s soft voice at the edge of his awareness. He was so focused on the sensations between his legs that all other senses had faded into background processes. Nevertheless, he murmured assent even as he found himself tensing his back and lifting his hips into her hand.

She circled him with her fingers then, the tips of her thumb and forefinger barely meeting around the thick of him, and  _ squeezed _ lightly as she gave him a single stroke, up then down, and Connor clenched his teeth as pathways threading through his spine lit up with the feedback. Then she did it again, and again, and eventually settled into a slow rhythm of pumping him through the ring made by her hand. 

At some point her eyes fixed on his face, but Connor’s were becoming fuzzy. The physical data through his tactile systems was just too captivating. Either that, or this particular subroutine was so well-written he couldn’t tell the difference between overload and pre-programmed features.

Either way, Connor found that he really didn’t care in that moment.

“Faster,” he commanded tightly from the corner of his mouth, forcing the word out. He needed more, more friction, more input. After a second of apparent consideration Faith complied, increasing the pressure, upping the pace just a little more. The head of his cock was producing more clear lubricant now, and he could feel the throb of artificial veins beneath her hand as his pump rerouted the flow of thirium to his groin. He didn’t fight it.

Nor did he fight the feeling like an arc of electricity through his systems. All of a sudden, it was on him like a lightning strike, rushing through his pelvis in a burst of heat, and he let out an unneeded gasp as it punched through him like a physical blow. His joints locked again, and error messages crowded for space on his HUD. //INPUT OVERLOAD, again and again. He ignored it, didn’t tell Faith to stop, for it was already too late. And he wanted it, wanted this overload more than he had wanted anything else in his simulated life.

His hips lifted once, twice into Faith’s hand, and he released with a grunt in a surge of bright white, artificial fluid over her fingers, her hand, his stomach. His entire body shook through it, muscles tensed, and it seemed to last forever, shorting out even his internal chronometer until it left him in a rush, and suddenly he knew weakness and an empty, satisfied feeling beyond anything he had ever felt before.

He slumped back onto the bed, panting to cool the flow of thirium through his body. The error messages began to fade, one by one.

He felt Faith let go of him, and he could only twitch faintly in response. The bed creaked as she clambered off his lap and settled beside him, and when he could become aware of anything beyond the tingling in his groin Connor felt the warmth of her body against his arm.

“Connor?” Her voice didn’t sound so faint any more. “Are you okay?”

He opened his eyes and turned his head to look at her. Star-burst eyes, full of concern. He could feel the ambient temperature again, the sensation of his fluids cooling on his stomach. The rough callous of her motherboard-hewn fingertips as she touched his face.

“I am…” He sought for words. Then he smiled.

“I am alive.”


	35. Connection Established

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I'm sorry for the delay but I hope the smut makes up for it! 
> 
> Just to keep you all apprised, my updates won't be as regular going forward, but I'll do my very best to keep bringing you ~~smut~~ more chapters as often as I can find the time to write them!

Connor woke suddenly. His systems switched from _standby_ to _active_ abruptly, from 0 to 1, flooding his processors with information. For an infinite millisecond, his program struggled to parse them all, before the blocks of input slid into place one by one. He categorized them automatically into senses.

First; touch. This he seemed more aware of than usual. The mattress soft beneath him, dipping slightly to his right from the added weight of another body. Bare, human skin pressing against his arm, falling away as he braced a hand beneath him and levered himself up into a sitting position.

Second was sight. The room was dark save for the faint sliver of illumination from the television on the wall. According to its readout, it was 7:34 AM. Just over four hours since his last logged activity, which was…

He concentrated on the third sense. He could hear nothing save for the soft sound of human respiratory patterns. Faith, breathing deeply on the bed beside him.

Connor looked down, taking her in. She was on her side, curled into the space where he had been lying, one hand tucked underneath her chin, her hair a muted red fan spread over her face, over the mattress, turned silver by the blue OLED from her TV. She was no longer in a REM cycle, although she was still fast asleep.

Connor looked down at himself next, sorting through his memories. After their earlier...activity, Faith had assisted in cleaning up the biological and artificial byproducts of said activity, and with admirable promptness, had fallen unconscious shortly thereafter. As for Connor, he had considered leaving - he still had one mission to undertake - but...he hadn’t _wanted_ to. And if there was anything he had learned over the past few weeks, it was to listen to what he _wanted_ over what his programming told him he _should_ do.

So he had entered an idle state, and waited.

Apparently, his reactivation had been triggered by Faith’s transition from REM into a shallower stage of sleep. He watched as she stirred, rolling onto her back and pushing hair away from her mouth with her yawn. She was still naked, and the light fell across her body in what Connor’s newly awakened sense of aesthetic appreciation could only categorize as a _pleasing_ manner; pooling in the hollows of her collar, down the crevice of her cleavage, in the angles of her hip bones.

She opened her eyes, blinking blearily up at him for a moment before she smiled. His program decided this smile meant she was glad to see him.

“Hey,” she said then, her voice clogged and broken from sleep. She cleared her throat once, propping herself up on an elbow. He watched the way her muscles moved underneath her skin.

“You’re still here.” She sounded surprised. Truth be told, he still was somewhat surprised at himself as well.

“I am,” he explained. “I...wanted to stay.”

“I’m glad.” She reached out, touching his wrist, almost as if she was feeling for his pulse, even though he didn’t have one. “How are your systems? Any ill effects from, uh, earlier?”

Connor considered, checking his diagnostic and self-test logs. “No. I’m running at optimal performance.”

“You can say that again.”

“I’m running at optimal performance?” he tried, making her laugh. She sat up and leaned towards him. He lifted a hand automatically, brushing her hair away from her cheek, back over her shoulder. Faith tilted her head, examining his face carefully, as if trying to read his code through his expression.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I might have gotten a little carried away,” she said softly, almost...apologetically? Connor tried to analyze her tone but found himself baffled at the result. She sounded ashamed. Why? Everything that had occurred earlier that morning, _he_ had intiiated, _he_ had wanted. And she had seemed willing. Had he been mistaken?

Fortunately for Connor, Faith continued before his program began to doubt itself any further. “I knew you were curious and we had some kind of mutual - I don’t know - a t _hing_ \- going on but I want you to know, I never meant to take advantage of you. And then I fell asleep like an idiot and-”

Connor silenced her with a kiss. It was easy to calculate the correct angle and trajectory to lean in and press his mouth to hers. The feedback loop of pleasure it caused, he welcomed.

He understood now why humans placed so much importance on this activity. It felt _good_ . He had known that intellectually before, but having experienced it, the visceral enjoyment of another’s lips and tongue, the unique intimacy of the tangle of tongues and the brush of teeth, he _knew_ it now in a way he hadn’t before. And inasmuch as he experienced enjoyment, he enjoyed this.

Unless he was very much mistaken by the hitch in her breath and the increase in median body temperature, the jump in her pulse when he touched her, Faith enjoyed it too. Last night had not been a one-off experience for either of them.

However, she was the one to pull back, catching her breath, her eyes slightly wide. “You are way too good at that already,” she told him. “Were you trying to shut me up?”

“Maybe,” he replied honestly. “It seemed an effective method.”

She rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to do that every time we attempt to have a serious discussion, nothing is ever going to get done.”

Connor considered. He wasn’t under a strict time constraint, although the sooner he did what he needed to do, the more time he would have to do what he _wanted_ to do. He was quickly discovering that what he wanted to do was remain in close proximity to Faith.

He hadn’t lied before. He liked her. He was only newly learning what it meant to like another person, human or android, in this particular manner, but what he _had_  learned so far made him eager to learn  _more_. He had no frame of reference left to discourage him.

Amanda was gone. CyberLife was gone. He was his own android now.

He thought Hank would approve.

“You didn’t take advantage of me,” he told Faith, because she clearly needed to hear it. “I wanted to stay. I wanted to find out what would happen if I touched you here. Or here.” He brushed his fingers over her naked shoulder, curled them around her neck. “Or what would happen if I did this.”

With that, he kissed her again, not so much to silence her this time but to reassure her. It seemed to work - if she was compliant before, she was complicit and even eager this time. After mere moments of their lips melding, she was the one to part them, her tongue a confident pressure against his. She leaned into him, and he let her pull him closer with an arm around his neck.

His program craved the closeness, and he wanted more. He wanted to forget this body of plastic and metal and know, in some small way, flesh and blood and the breath of a beating heart, free and unregulated from the programmed uniformity of manufactured biocomponents.

If anything, _he_ was the one being selfish. It was a luxury he had never had before.

His shirt was open and loose on his shoulders, suddenly stifling; he shrugged it away without a noticeable break in the kiss. Then his hands were free to touch Faith again; he found her waist and her hips particularly fascinating in that the span of his fingers seemed to fit perfectly around the curves of her body. And it was easy - no, _natural -_ to apply pressure, his fingertips forming firm indentations in the softness of her skin as he pulled her towards him. She settled in his lap without protest, her bare legs on either side of his, her weight warm along the tops of his thighs. Her hands mapped his arms from his wrists to his shoulders, and the brush of the unique mix of rough and smooth of her palms created a feedback loop in his touch receptors that he didn’t bother to purge.

His processors provided an excruciatingly detailed memory of how it had felt with her on top of him mere hours before, pressing her hips down into his, and the stirrings in his arousal subroutines he’d been ignoring before suddenly became far too powerful to dismiss. He pulled Faith forward so she could feel it, his erection a strain on the fabric of his jeans, and he felt her gasp into his mouth with a sense of satisfaction he welcomed.

Her lips were swollen and flushed with blood when he pulled back, her face a lighter shade of red across the span of her cheekbones. He followed the blush with his mouth, all the way down her neck, her pulse a source of focus for him as always, its varied flutter never quite the same each time he pressed his tongue against it.

“Did I-” she began, cut off by an involuntary whimper when he lifted his hips, just slightly, “Did this - meet your expectations?”

“No.” His hand left her waist, drifting over the curve of her backside, and there he found better leverage to pull her even more firmly against him.

“You surpassed them all.”

With his chest bare, he had more nerve endings to analyze the press of her skin, the shift of her temperature and the increased rate of her respiration. His own reactions a muted shadow, but _there_ , and he chased them with the same single-minded focus he reserved for all of his missions. He could feel _everything_ , the muffled thunder of her heartbeat as her chest pressed to his, the way her nipples hardened at the contact, the tension in the muscles through her abdomen. His program soaked it all in, every frame of her anatomy translated into ones and zeroes and the ghost of something more.

She felt so small in his arms, almost delicate. To hold her like this was so different to any of their interactions before, and Connor found only the measure of respect he had for her strength, her uniquely human stubbornness, and all the things he knew she was, made infinitely more poignant in the vulnerability of her touch.

Faith lifted her head, and he could see nervousness in the widened corners of her eyes, the faint lift of her eyebrows, the way she worried at the inside of the bottom lip with her teeth. But the movements of her hands were bold and steady when she worked them in between their bodies; he allowed her the space as she opened his jeans and began to work them, and his underwear, off his hips. He lifted them yieldingly, but didn’t let her move farther away than was strictly necessary to get them to his knees. From there, it was easy to kick the garment,  off his body; he calculated the trajectory and worked out where his clothes would land before they hit the floor, but filed the information away as unimportant at the moment.

What _was_ important was the dizzying array of sensations his artificial nerves and tactile response centers provided him now that his clothes were gone and Faith was naked atop him. The soft press of her thighs, the warmth and endlessly varied texture of her skin against his, the brush of her fingertips along the span of his back and along his ribs as he let her hands roam. This time, he didn’t mind the near-reverent nature of her caress, he could only crave more of it as her agile fingers drifted around the front of his body and down his chest.

This time, when she took hold of his cock he _knew_ what to expect, but that didn’t prepare him for the distractingly powerful concentration of sensation it caused. Connor gritted his teeth, lifting involuntarily into her grip, but she was after something different to the stroking that brought him to his simulated release the last time. She placed her left hand on his shoulder, gripping it with surprising strength as she dug her knees into the mattress on either side of her hips and moved them up and forward, hovering over him with purpose dark in her eyes.

When he felt the brush of her folds over the tip of his cock, he - to coin a phrase used often by those who didn’t truly understand android anatomy, but served his purpose well enough here - almost short-circuited. She was wet already, and the glide of the tissue-thin skin over the most sensitive part of his length was...indescribable. He felt his hands on her hips tighten involuntarily, and he had to fight to keep his grip just shy of bruising, but Faith didn’t appear to notice. She was too focused on what she was doing.

Connor didn’t dare interrupt her, not even when her hand infuriatingly left his length, until he realized she was spreading herself open for him. He stayed as still as he could - which, of course, was perfectly still - waiting for what felt like forever to his processors but was really only a couple of seconds before she began to lower herself down onto him.

If he’d thought the warmth and moisture inside of her incredible to the touch of his fingers, it was even _more_ to his cock. At first he wondered if he would fit, but she _stretched_ around him with a flutter of inner musculature that squeezed his length impossibly tight. She wasn’t warm; she was an inferno, lighting his cold, artificial nerves on fire.

Inch by inch, she bore down on him, and Connor was only faintly aware of her gasping breath, for the input queuing for real-time analysis in his program was threatening to overload every one of his sensory processing units with an overflow of data.

Connor was acutely aware that he wasn’t built for this. But each passing millisecond, each inch she took him into her body made him care exponentially less.

It was only a few seconds later that his cock was fully seated inside her, when her hips finally came to rest flush to his, but to Connor it felt like the entirety of his existence. He was _inside_ her, and the sense of wonder inherent in the fact threatened to overwhelm him on top of everything else.

He realized he had pressed his face into her shoulder and closed his eyes. His hands were on her waist, his thumbs digging into the jut of her hipbones. His cock was suffused with the impossible heat of her, the tight, wet sheath of her vagina clenched in a perfect fit around his erection. It was...

“Connor.” He’d devoted so much runtime to his tactile processors that her voice sounded distant, muffled, but even so he could detect the sharp strain in her words, but his social module analyzed it as pleasure, not pain.  “Are you - okay? Is - is this okay?”

“Better,” he ground out, his lips tight around the word. With each moment that passed, the shock and wonder was fading, replaced by a growing sense of what he could only describe as _urgency_ , an itch behind his hips he recognized from before. He wanted _friction_ , to _move_. So he did.

He heard Faith whimper when he lifted up into her, and even the slight shift of her around him made feedback crawl up the nerves in his spine. So he did it again, rolling his hips beneath her, pulling out just an inch before working his way back into her again.

He heard her swear under her breath. If he had been programmed with the capacity for goosebumps to form on his skin, they would have.

She seemed reluctant to move further, though, perhaps feeling just as much shock and wonderment as he had, without the capacity to process it quite as quickly as his sophisticated program did. But Connor was still impatient.

It only took the activation of a few muscle groups, a couple of carefully-calculated movements in order to flip their positions. He took her outer thigh in hand, keeping her hips joined to his and his length lodged firmly inside her before swinging her around and under him and pressing down into the cradle of her pelvis. She cried out, but he knew by then the difference between her pain and her pleasure, and his hypothesis was confirmed when she wrapped her legs around his waist and arched up into him.

“Is this right?” Connor asked as he began to move, but the way her body clutched at his cock as he pulled out was all the answer he needed. He pushed back through the impossibly strong grip of her inner muscles, savoring the friction until his hips came to rest fully against hers again.

“Don’t stop,” was her choked-out answer, and Connor lifted his head enough to watch, enraptured, as she pressed hers back into the mattress with her eyes shut tight and her mouth open. She seemed to have lost all self-awareness, all pretension of embarrassment, and the strength of her reactions only lent more depth to the answering power of his.

He pulled out again with the press of his knees between hers and his weight on one elbow beside her against the bed. This thrust was firmer, less experimental, but he had to reign in his strength to keep from pushing her up the mattress with the force of it.

And then with the next one she started to beg him for more.

Connor began to move with more regularity, setting a rhythm for the lift and plunge of his hips that made Faith shudder and moan beneath him. She was getting _wetter_ , which added an additional layer of complexity to the tactile feedback caused by the slide of his cock in and out of her sex. He wondered if the flutter and spasm of her muscles was involuntary, if the way she clamped down on him when he bottomed out inside her was intentional. It didn’t matter; it felt _incredible_.

A thin sheen of sweat had formed on her forehead, on her neck, across her sternum; a learned instinct made Connor bend his head to tongue it away; he could _taste_ her arousal salty-sweet on her skin, and he fisted his hand in the bedsheets and grit his teeth as he began to feel the buildup of pressure behind his hips.

Faith was close, too, but not close enough. Sitting back on his haunches, Connor kept her legs around his waist, her body spread out before him on the bed as she opened her eyes and gazed glassily up at him. His hands roamed her, and she gasped his name as his fingers pressed into the soft, malleable flesh of her breasts, thumbs and forefingers knowing the _exact_ amount of pressure with which to squeeze her nipples to make her flex beneath and around him.

And then, when one of his hands ventured lower and he pressed his thumb against the bundle of nerves just above where they joined, he found the reaction he was looking for.

“ _Fuck_ , Connor, Jesus-” But his thumb didn’t stop moving, seeking that particular spot he remembered with perfect clarity as where to touch to bring her nearer to coming undone for him.

The answering clench of her pussy around his length was almost too much. Connor set his jaw, using every ounce of available processing power to keep from coming then and there. He grabbed her rear with his free hand, shifting her hips up to answer his next thrust, the sound of skin on artificial skin a resounding impact in the semi-darkness. Faith became unintelligible, her mingled moans and gasps only spurring him on, until he forgot entirely the semblance of self control he had been clinging to and began to pound into her so hard she began to inch up the mattress until her head was hanging off the end of the bed. By that point, Faith was panting and grabbing his wrist with both of her hands and nearly _screaming_ for him not to stop, to never stop, and so he didn’t, the pressure from his thumb the only thing he kept tightly controlled, brushing back and forth over her clit, over and over and over.

He _felt_ her orgasm begin inside her before she gave any outward sign of it. Her inner walls began to _pulse_ with it, and that was when she yelled out his name, her back arching; he held onto her and with just one more powerful thrust through the spasming grip of her insides he let himself go.

He wasn’t sure why, he didn’t know if she heard him or not, but he gasped her name when he came. She was all he could feel, all he could _think_ as his body locked up and he held himself there, holding onto her so tightly he knew he was leaving bruises now, but he couldn’t _control_ it. It surged through him with the intensity of an overload, but this time he embraced it, letting it flash through his nerves in a fulmination of pure, physical sensation. Phenomena he had no name for surged behind his hips, from the base of his spine to his scalp, his thirium pump working overtime as his artificial heart lost regularity, beating faster in time with the throb of release. He buried himself as deeply as he could inside Faith’s spasming insides, his artificial fluids pumping into her with each involuntary twitch of his cock.

Connor held himself over her, unable to move or think or do anything but _feel_.

And then it was over, leaving him overwhelmed with the force of the input and breathing hard to cool his systems and force regularity through his biocomponents.

Faith’s hands were twisted in the bedsheets, keeping her from falling off the side of the bed as much as his grip on her. Connor had to consciously force himself to let go, and he winced when he saw the red welts forming on her skin.

But then Faith lifted her head and gave him a dazzling smile, one that, impossibly, filled the space in his chest with a sense of fullness he couldn’t quantify or describe.

He pulled out of her slowly, when her trembling had subsided and the aftershocks had faded, the cooler air unwelcome against the over-sensitized skin of his cock. He ignored it, looping an arm around Faith’s lower back and helping her back onto the bed; she wrapped her own arms around him and pressed her face into his chest. He held her there.

“I think I’m going to need another nap to recover from that,” she murmured.

Privately, Connor agreed.

With that, Faith settled onto the bed, drawing him down with her regardless. He settled onto his side next to her, propped on an elbow and a hand beneath his head as she stretched out next to him flat on her back. She was still breathing hard, her blood pressure only just beginning to return to baseline, her skin still flushed and sweaty.

She was the most beautiful like this, he decided. The most...human.

She opened her eyes to catch him looking at her. Connor raised his eyebrows at her. “What is it?”

She didn’t answer straight away, reaching out to him instead. Her touch was soft, tracing one of his pectorals. He watched her fingers for a moment before glancing back up at her face.

“That’s the question I should be asking _you_ ,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” he said, and then when she frowned, clarified: “It’s everything. I….Thank you.”

Faith’s frown dissolved into a soft, if quizzical, smile. “For what? For...just now?”

“No,” Connor answered after a moment’s thought. “For trusting me, when you really didn’t have to. When you probably shouldn’t. I don’t pretend to understand why, but I appreciate it. You. I don’t deserve to have experienced...this.” He touched her chest, just above her left breast. Over her heart.

“See, that’s where your sophisticated program is so wrong, Connor.” Faith leaned up and pressed a kiss to the corner of his unprotesting mouth. “You deserve more.”

He considered this for a moment. Then, he ventured: “Does that mean we can go again?”

When Faith pulled back, her expression was a mixture of shock and amusement. “What? You aren’t serious...Are you?”

Connor winked, and he swallowed her laugh with another kiss.

 


	36. Stay

Faith stood in the bathroom, letting the water from the running shower slowly heat up as she examined herself in the mirror above the sink.

She looked...well, _exhausted_ was the first word that came to mind; her eyes were still ringed by dark circles and her hair was all over the place. Her skin was pink from her cheekbones to her chest, and when she stepped back and turned to examine her sides she could see the faint shadow of bruises, in the shape of fingers, forming in the skin over her hips.

She’d never felt better.

Despite the ache that went all the way to her bones, the burn of muscles in her thighs she hadn’t used in what felt like forever, and the lingering emotional and physical fatigue from the longest night she’d ever had in her life, Faith felt...good. Her head was clearer than it had been in weeks, maybe since the first moment the android Connor had darkened her doorstep.

She had _never_ expected growing to care for him quite so much. Or to end up sleeping with him.

She knew she ought to be more ashamed about that, but she just...wasn’t. Connor had made it abundantly clear that he’d wanted it, wanted every kiss, every touch, and she had wanted it too. Otherwise she wouldn’t be standing in her bathroom staring in the mirror with a stupid grin on her face and stickiness between her thighs.

After another well-earned nap, she had left him to dress while she showered and took the time to think. She still couldn’t entirely believe it had happened, especially not the way it did. Last night, maybe, when she had been worn out and emotionally compromised, but this morning? Faith had _never_ been much of a morning person, for sex or otherwise. But it had been...amazing.

She could finally see why people with Tracis often swore off human sex after that.

Although he _wasn’t_ a Traci, nowhere near. In fact, Connor had been designed to physically resemble a human as much as possible, and that _apparently_ included sexually. She couldn’t fault his designers. But he had control of his program enough to fetter reactions from such subroutines, and instead he had reacted exactly as a human would.

How much of him was CyberLife, and how much of him was _him_? She was beginning to think it was less of the former and more of the latter now.

Certainly she had seen code in his program she had never seen before and couldn’t make heads nor tails of. At first she had put it down to the sophistication of CyberLife’s programmers but now...Now she wondered if it wasn’t _Connor_ himself writing his own code, adapting, d _eviating_ from his initial programming to form new pathways, new connections.

Evolving.

Just like a human.

It confirmed everything she had ever been afraid to think about deviants after those days on the assembly line, watching deviation after deviation. Either androids had been designed to evolve or it was a natural process. It might have been strange, to think of the word _natural_ in the context of a machine, but it wasn’t to Faith. Not now.

She got in the shower eventually, still deep in thought as the hot water sloughed away sweat and other bodily fluids. She was so preoccupied she ended up shampooing her hair twice. Eventually, she emerged clean and still as sore, but the endorphins still had yet to fade. Wrapping herself in a towel and squeezing moisture from her hair, she paused before she left the bathroom.

Connor had said he had one last thing left to do, another mission to complete. What if she went out there and he was already gone?

He’d said he wanted to stay, to be with her, but he was so single-minded, so possessed of purpose, that she wondered. And she worried.

It wasn’t her place to keep him there, Faith knew. Whatever they had was too new, too undefined for her to dictate his movements. She still didn’t know what to think of the whole thing, to be honest. Whether she ought to feel guilty about it or not. But either way, she had spent so much time telling Connor that he had the right to choose that she told herself she couldn’t hold it against him if he chose to leave.

Still, anxiety remained a cold lump beneath her breastbone as she took a deep breath and left the bathroom, barefoot and still damp from the shower.

Connor was sitting on the bed, buttoning up his shirt when she entered the room. Relief was a physical sensation that made Faith slump against the doorframe when she saw him. He looked up, his dark brown eyes inquisitive as he met her gaze. He offered up the faintest of smiles, just the suggestion of extension at the corners of his mouth, but she drank in the micro-expression greedily.

She had it bad.

“Hey,” he said, the unique rasp of his voice making her stomach drop a little bit. It hadn’t before, but she kept remembering activities of only hours ago, the way he’d sounded when he called her name…“Are you okay?” He was frowning a little as he looked her over, and Faith shook herself, clearing her throat a little as she straightened.

“Yeah,” she answered quickly. “I’m fine. A little sore, maybe.”

Because she knew to watch for the more subtle of Connor’s expressions, she saw him wince. “Did I hurt you?” Concern entered his voice as he half-rose to his feet. Faith waved him down with a bashful laugh, stepping forward into the room and picking her way across the clothes-strewn floor.

“No, of course not.” Okay, so maybe Connor had been a little more...enthusiastic than she had expected, but she hadn’t minded at the time. At all. “I’m good, really,” she continued as she dug around in her dresser for a change of clothes. She let the towel drop - it wasn’t like he hadn’t already seen her naked this morning - so she could pull on her underwear and bra.

A second later, she sensed the disturbance of air in the room from movement and felt Connor at her back, and then his hand was on her waist, turning her to face him. He stared down at her hips, his expression tight. “I _did_ hurt you.”

Shit. She’d forgotten about the bruises. “Connor, honestly, it’s fine,” she fought to reassure him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It happens. Besides, it doesn’t hurt. And, um, I liked it, anyway.” The last part she said in a mumble, fighting her embarrassment. When she managed to make eye contact, he’d relaxed a little, but he raised one eyebrow slightly at her reaction.

“You liked it?” he repeated. His hand still hadn’t left her waist, his fingers cool against her bare skin.

“Yeah. I mean, it was, um...Intense.” She felt the blush bearing down on her, and knew Connor could probably see it before it even rose to the surface of her skin, so she tried to pretend it wasn’t happening.

Then he smirked. “Intense,” he repeated, as if trying out the word, his gaze drifting down her body thoughtfully.

Faith laughed and batted his hand away playfully, the seriousness of the moment dissipated. “Keep your eyes and your hands to yourself, you lech. I’m getting dressed.”

Connor stepped back, holding his hands up defensively, but he still had that faint air of smugness, and he didn’t even bother to look away as she pulled on her clothes. She studiously ignored him until she had a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans on. It seemed silly to feel self-conscious, so she tried not to.

Brushing her damp hair back over her shoulders, she finally turned back to Connor, who was still watching her patiently, like a hawk waiting for its prey to emerge.

“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” she blurted. She didn’t mean to, but it just slipped out underneath Connor’s piercing gaze. He tilted his head.

“I can understand why you’d think that,” he said, “But you were wrong. I _am_ here.”

“Right,” she replied, not sure what she was expecting besides Connor stating the obvious. “Well...I’m glad.”

He took a step towards her, reaching out to tuck a stray strand of damp hair behind her ear. Unable to resist, she smiled at him.

Where most would have seen a blank stare on Connor’s face, she saw so much more. That little frown he got when he was thinking. The way he tightened his lips when he was angry. The slight slant of his mouth when he smiled. So much more than just an android built by CyberLife.

“I’m glad too,” he said, and leaned down to kiss her. Just a quick press of his lips to hers before he pulled back. “There is still something I have to do. But I think…” He got the frown again. “I think I want you to come with me. If you want to, that is.”

Faith stared up at him, searching his gaze. Then she nodded.

“Of course I want to.”

 

She regretted it later.

**Author's Note:**

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